Necropolitics Covered

54

Covering abstracts and excerpts of academic pieces on necropolitics from all over the world. necropolitics.substack.com

  1. 1 day ago

    Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities

    Lo, M. S. (2015) ‘Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(15), pp. 2672–2687. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1042894. Abstract: This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities

  2. 3 days ago

    Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish

    Paynter, E. (2025) ‘Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish’, Cultural Studies, 39(6), pp. 887–911. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2025.2538523. Abstract: This article explores forms of haunting that shape lives and livelihoods in the Mediterranean, recognising the sea as a site of movement, labour, and death. The Mediterranean is now widely understood as a kind of deathscape, as people on the move from former European colonies risk and lose their lives en route to Europe. Yet the production of migrant death – its materiality and simultaneous spectacle and invisibility – is not simply a consequence of harsh border policies. Here, I trace how migrant death in the Mediterranean is a crucial part of the racialized mechanisms that maintain a precarious labour force within Europe and transform livelihoods across Mediterranean shores. Engaging the Black Mediterranean as a site of haunting, I centre the relationship between haunting and care in a reading of the 2018 documentary Strange Fish (dir. Giulia Bertoluzzi), which describes how the production of death in the Central Mediterranean has transformed the labour of fishermen in Zarzis, Tunisia, who have been rescuing migrants and burying the dead since the early 2000s. Writing as an ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg) who has spent extended time in Italy with people who have survived the sea crossing, I read the film both in terms of the unfolding history it documents, as well as through the visual and sonic elements it employs to illustrate these entangled forms of care and labour. In solidarity with people on the move, I argue that, as necropolitical border regimes threaten to upend notions of the refugee and related issues of rights and justice, it is crucial to understand and engage death at sea not strictly as a migration issue, but as a quotidian reality entangled in questions of labour and social justice on all shores of the Mediterranean. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish

  3. 5 days ago

    The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain's temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)

    Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods). Citation: Méndez, G. L. (2014) ‘The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain’s temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15(1–2), pp. 241–271. doi: 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain's temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)

  4. 10 Jul

    The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling

    Sargsyan, N. (2022) ‘The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 32(3), pp. 289–305. doi: 10.1080/0740770X.2022.2360786. Abstract: In this audio-textual performance woven as an Armenian fairy tale from ethnographic research, poetry, and songs, I employ the performative as part of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogical praxis. Through this feminist performative storytelling I affectively study and mourn the immobilizing effects of the densely interconnected processes of death-making whether it be through colonization, ecological extraction, militarization and war, or sex-selective abortions. Drawing on transnational feminist knowledge, I suture life-sustaining moments of respite and healing, however transient and quick, into this protracted study and mourning to practice living in the wake of ongoing catastrophes and crises. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling

  5. 8 Jul

    Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn

    Rowland, A. L. (2017) ‘Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47(1), pp. 26–48. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2016.1238105. Abstract: This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn

  6. 6 Jul

    Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum

    Scaramuzzo, P. (2026) ‘Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum’, International Journal of LGBTQ+ Youth Studies, pp. 1–18. doi: 10.1080/29968992.2026.2657861. Abstract: The opioid and stimulant overdose crisis has increasingly intersected with queer sexual cultures, particularly through party-and-play (PnP) practices embedded within hookup, dating, and companionship apps (HUDCAs). While public health research has documented elevated risks associated with app-mediated, substance-involved sex, health education in secondary schooling has largely failed to address these realities. This conceptual article examines how curricular silence around HUDCAs and PnP functions as structural erasure, rendering queer adolescent youth – especially BIPOC queer youth – hyper-visible in risk surveillance yet invisible in curricular care. Drawing on Foucauldian analyses of power and silence, queer theory (QT), and critical race theory (CRT), the article argues that omission operates as a biopolitical mechanism that displaces sexual learning into unstructured digital spaces without guidance or harm-reduction support. Through historical parallels with HIV/AIDS education, the analysis demonstrates that educational discomfort has often preceded survivability-oriented intervention. The article concludes by proposing a queered, harm-reduction-centered framework for secondary school health education that integrates HUDCA literacy, PnP-informed harm reduction, and attention to racialized inequities, reframing education as anticipatory preparation rather than abandonment. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum

  7. 3 Jul

    Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement

    Agathangelou, A. M. and Killian, K. D. (2006) ‘Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement’, Globalizations, 3(4), pp. 459–483. doi: 10.1080/14747730601022453. Abstract: Poetics, as an epistemological approach, articulates alternative imaginaries to those proffered by the neoliberal world order. With a long history of drawing upon various sites to further its aims (e.g. the academy, the international studies association, political parties, the state), the neoliberal world order has used its epistemologies to constitute a hegemony emphasizing the state as the primary actor of political life. Feminists and scholars in postcolonial IR, black studies, and ethnic studies have challenged this idea, arguing that there are differential epistemological economies in world politics. Larger questions at stake in these different sites/cites include self and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the envisioning of alternative, oppositional histories of decolonization, struggle and contestation. Traditional disciplinary boundaries become sites/cites of contestation about the forging and making of alternatives as academics, grassroots organizers, and activists, through poetics, work together to creatively engage questions of economies, power, history, and subject-formations. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement

  8. 2 Jul

    Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness

    Bretherton, L. (2021) ‘Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness’, Political Theology, 22(7), pp. 627–649. doi: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1867406. Abstract: This essay analyses three concerns that arise at the intersection of ethics and politics through situating the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his conception of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism, in the context of debates in the British New Left and drawing parallels and connections between these debates and the work of C. L. R. James and Black Marxism. The first concern is the modern suspension of ethics in the name of politics. The second is the relationship between structural and personal transformation. The third is how forms of social life exceed, but are always under pressure from, existing forms of political economy and how this concern shapes articulations of political agency outside of statist and property-based understandings of citizenship. I contend that addressing these concerns is a background condition for the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness
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Covering abstracts and excerpts of academic pieces on necropolitics from all over the world. necropolitics.substack.com

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