Predicate: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Journal
Theme: X
Michel Foucault defines biopolitics as “this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of security [or dispositifs] as its essential technical instrument.” Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, in turn, describe the “biopolitical turn” as “a proliferation of studies, claiming Foucault as an inspiration, on the relations between ‘life’ and ‘politics.’” As scholars have further engaged with and complicated the concept of biopolitics, new trends have emerged from its lineage – from necropolitics to the global proliferations of surveillance to biomanufacturing.
To revisit and expand conceptions of biopolitics, the English Graduate Student Association at Georgetown University seeks proposals from various disciplines and theoretical approaches for publication in Predicate, its annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Journal. Some possible
lines of inquiry include: How have body modifications like reading glasses and walking canes or scarification and subdermal implants redefined feeling and experience? With Europe’s recent court cases on the “right to be forgotten” in mind, how does the inability to have our presence die on the Internet extend our boundaries of life? In what ways has literature or film redefined
conception and birth with our society’s focus on reproductive rights? Refuting traditional notions of the human-animal binary, how has technology reified and/or complicated our distinctions between the human and the other?
While certainly not comprehensive, papers addressing any of the following are welcome:
• The ontological turn
• Affect studies
• Ecological approaches/ the Anthropocene
• Law and literature
• Materialisms
• Temporality
• Digital humanities
• Boundaries of the human
• Pop culture
• Biotechnology
• Cyborg studies
All submissions must be 10-15 pages in length, typed in standard 12-point font, and formatted as per MLA guidelines. Please send your entries in to the journal editor, Queenie Sukhadia, at newbiopolitics@gmail.com by March 2nd, 2018. Submissions should include your proposed paper title as well as a short bio (100 words), giving your name, institutional affiliation, and department.