Necropolitics Covered

54

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

  1. And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

    2H AGO

    And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

    Stevenson, O., Kenten, C. and Maddrell, A. (2016) ‘And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning’, Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), pp. 153–165. doi: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1152396. Abstract: A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh. 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

    2 min
  2. Doing research among exiled Rwandan army deserters: a reflexive narrative

    1D AGO

    Doing research among exiled Rwandan army deserters: a reflexive narrative

    Ncube, F. (2025). Doing research among exiled Rwandan army deserters: a reflexive narrative. Social Dynamics, 51(1), 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2025.2593069 This paper reflects on my experiences of doing research among ex-soldiers who deserted from the post-conflict Rwandan military, who believe that they are being “hunted” by their government, allegedly, for political reasons. It attends to practices of doing fieldwork among people whose normal lives are suspended by the perpetual need to navigate the daily threat of discovery by the long arm of the Rwandan state and the very real threat of violence and death in exile. I show how fear, as a profound ontological condition, can shape the process of research. I foreground the materiality of fear and propose that the interlocutors’ consciousness and sensitivity to the hazards that the field is infused with can influence the nature of ethnography. Through fear, politically sensitive research can produce moving ethnography, that is, a kind of ethnography in which the participants and researcher are in an enhanced state of sensory and nomadic comportment during fieldwork. Analysis of data draws mainly on insights from Vigh’s ideas on social navigation, Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics and Deleuzian ideas of the control society. 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

    1 min
  3. Transnational America: race, gender and citizenship after 9/11

    2D AGO

    Transnational America: race, gender and citizenship after 9/11

    Grewal, I. (2003) ‘Transnational America: race, gender and citizenship after 9/11’, Social Identities, 9(4), pp. 535–561. doi: 10.1080/1350463032000174669. This paper examines the racialisation and gendering of a collective subject described as ‘Middle Eastern or Muslim’ in the US media in the aftermath of 9/11. It examines how this category came to be visible and prominent through the workings of disciplinary power and forms of governmentality through the binary of freedom and unfreedom, necropolitics and the politics of security and freedom. Multiculturalism in the US, as it was articulated in consumer culture through the national spectacle of the flag, emerged as an example of this new form of governmentality that is both regulative and productive of American nationalism and transnationalism. 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

    1 min
  4. Dialogues with the Dead: Necropoetics of Zahra’s Paradise

    2D AGO

    Dialogues with the Dead: Necropoetics of Zahra’s Paradise

    Shams, F. (2020). Dialogues with the Dead: Necropoetics of Zahra’s Paradise. Iranian Studies, 53(5–6), 893–909. https://doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2019.1689809 What can the poetry chosen for epitaphs on graves tell us about the political and cultural development of post-revolutionary Iran and the politics of death and dying under the Islamic Republic? This article explores contemporary Persian epitaph poetry as a valuable medium for understanding the socio-political dynamics of Iranian society. By analyzing the epitaphs of the Iran–Iraq war martyrs, who are buried in Zahra’s Paradise public cemetery in Tehran (Behesht-e Zahra), a new nomenclature can be established for the religious, political and socio-cultural ideas underpinning death and the afterlife. 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

    1 min
  5. “Better never means better for everyone”: White feminist necropolitics and Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale

    3D AGO

    “Better never means better for everyone”: White feminist necropolitics and Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale

    Neville-Shepard, M. (2023) ‘“Better never means better for everyone”: White feminist necropolitics and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 109(1), pp. 2–25. doi: 10.1080/00335630.2022.2136738. This article builds on those who have critiqued Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale along racial lines and calls into question the esteemed status the show holds as a rhetorical resource for contemporary feminist activism. By drawing attention to the parasitical relationship that the archetype of the vulnerable (but resilient) white woman has to Black pain and death, I argue that the series further calcifies the dominance of white feminism, enacting what I term “white feminist necropolitics.” To illuminate this theory, the essay presents a close analysis of The Handmaid's Tale. Specifically, I demonstrate how the show deploys post-racial logics to center a white feminist heroine whose story of saviorism relies on the cooptation of Black pain and the exploitation of Black death. Ultimately, this critical reading of the series points to the ways in which white feminism and necropolitics are intricately entangled. 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

    1 min
  6. Splintering Palestine (2005)

    4D AGO

    Splintering Palestine (2005)

    Gregory, D., 2005. Splintering Palestine. B/ordering Space, pp.123-37. Excerpt: Topographies of Terror. Ever since 11 September 2001, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has taken advantage of President George W. Bush's `war on terrorism' to ratchet up the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people (Mansour, 2002; Gregory, 2003). It has done so by seeking to establish an identity between the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and the increasingly militarized Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation of what remains.of Palestine: Gaza and the West Bank. As a result `terrorism' has been made polymorphous. Without defined shape or determinate roots, its mantle can be cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power. This has allowed the Sharon regime to advance its colonial project not through appeals to Zionism alone, to the Messianic mission of `redeeming' the biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria, but also - crucially for its international constituency - as another front in a generalized `war on terrorism'. This has in turn sustained the neoconservative deception that political violence can somehow be ended without reference to the historico-geographical conditions that frame it. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated, racist insistence that `the root cause of terrorism lies not in grievance but in a disposition toward unbridled violence' has been reaffirmed by both the Bush and Sharon administrations. It conveniently exempts their own actions from scrutiny and absolves them of anything other than a restless, roving military response (Netanyahu, 1986) 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

    2 min
  7. Itinerant deathworlds: Spanish border externalisation and the necroborder

    APR 15

    Itinerant deathworlds: Spanish border externalisation and the necroborder

    Lopez Oggier, F. (2026). Itinerant deathworlds: Spanish border externalisation and the necroborder. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2025.2594500 Abstract: In 2006 Spain spearheaded European border externalisation, re-spatialising its border into a peripatetic political institution to systematically intercept ‘irregular’ migrants. This paper conducts a necropolitical analysis of Spain’s border externalisation projects by reviewing migrant mortality/disappearance data and conducting a discourse analysis of first-hand migrant accounts with the dislocated bordering apparatus. I posit that Spain’s border externalisation efforts create ‘itinerant deathworlds’: a dislocated form of necropower that follows migrants while they are in transit. Post-mortem violence and psychic trauma cause itinerant deathworlds to linger long after migration journeys have ended, projecting them into indeterminate spatio-temporal scales. 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

    1 min
  8. Whose turn is it? White diasporic and transnational practices and the necropolitics of the plantation and internment camps

    APR 14

    Whose turn is it? White diasporic and transnational practices and the necropolitics of the plantation and internment camps

    Palombo, L., 2007. Whose turn is it? White diasporic and transnational practices and the necropolitics of the plantation and internment camps. Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 3. Abstract: The bordering of the Plantation Camps of the 1860s and Internment Camps of World War One (WW1) through the racialised biopolitical and necropolitical relations of the state of exception have controlled local shifts from the position of non-white and white ‘objects of labour’ to ‘political subjects’ or citizens of the nation. The borders of the Camps are violent colonial techniques that re-affirm an anglophilic form of white diasporic and transnational power. This process of instituting borders of control “outside the law” has operated to strengthen white anglophilic sovereignty and its participation and embeddedness in a “global” colonial project. These camps became permanent “exceptional”1 spatial arrangements that diversified but also continued the effects of the dislocation of Indigenous Australians. These camps continued the violent mechanisms that attempted to control Indigenous people’s “life and death” and that in Mbembe’s words have “civilize[d]” them as providers of free labour (see Perera 2002: para 11; Mbembe 2003: 14 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

    1 min
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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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