Category: Conference Reports

A report by Olly Zinetti, Open University

The session, ‘Re-doing Biopolitics’, was rooted in conceptions of biopolitics derived in particular from Esposito’s text, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008). It was from the interconnected nature of livingness the text proposes, and the political consequences affirming such interconnectedness generates, where discussion began. Knowing, then, that biosecurity – making life safe – is not static, rather it is a set of ongoing practices (Hinchcliffe and Bingham, 2008), the session and its speakers sought to tease out the workings of those practices, with papers focussed on the empirical.

A report by Krithika Srinivasan, King’s College London

I presented a paper entitled ‘Controlling dogs, protecting turtles: Contemporary biopolitics in more-than-human India’ in the HPGRG session ‘Re-imagining biopolitics and biosecurity’ at the RGS-IBG AC 2011. This paper stems from my PhD project, and examines two cases of public debate around human-animal relationships in the world’s largest democracy, India. While one case deals with conflicts around the control of street dogs (animals that are considered ‘pests’), the other explores conflicts relating to the protection of ‘vulnerable’ Olive Ridley turtles.