Progressive Geographies

Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar, Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making -University of Minnesota Press, 2020

I’ve noted this book before, in a post of ‘books received’, but seems especially relevant to the present moment.

In their seemingly relentless pursuit of life, do contemporary U.S. “biocultures”—where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices—also engage in a deadly endeavor? Challenging us to question their implications, Deadly Biocultures shows that efforts to “make live” are accompanied by the twin operation of “let die”: they validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability. Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill.

Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures?

 

Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar have written a brilliant book about the Janus-faced nature of neoliberal biopolitics. Focusing on a diverse range of topics, from race-based medicine to the ‘war on cancer,’ they superbly show how practices and technologies aimed at fostering life in liberal democratic regimes perversely produce vulnerability, death-in-life, and even death itself.

Jonathan Xavier Inda, author of Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life

 

I’ve shared a couple of these on Twitter, but putting them in the same place. Will add others if I see them, or please add as comments.

Free Quarantine Ebooks from Verso – Reading in a time of coronavirus: download your free ebooks until April 2.

Ten Free Ebooks from Haymarket Books: Angela Y Davis, Naomi Klein and others

“You can search all open access content on JSTOR without a login – there’s more than 6,000 ebooks and over 150 journals”: https://jstor.org/open/ [Clarification: this appears just to be the stuff that was already open access, not a wider opening up of the archive]

And the Cambridge UP textbooks previously mentioned are available here.

Update: World e-book here (looks good for people with children)

JHU Press – free access to Project Muse: “The collection’s 1,400 books and 97 journals will be accessible for free through May 31 to help university students complete coursework at home”

Cambridge University Press is making higher education textbooks in HTML format free to access online during the coronavirus outbreak.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/textbooks#

Thanks to dmf for posting this as a comment – reposting here to give it more exposure.

Cambridge University Press is making higher education textbooks in HTML format free to access online during the coronavirus outbreak.

Over 700 textbooks, published and currently available, on Cambridge Core are available regardless of whether textbooks were previously purchased.

We recommend a Laptop/Desktop computer with Google Chrome for the best viewing experience. Textbook content is read only and cannot be downloaded.

Free access is available until the end of May 2020.

I’m not entirely sure how much or what kind of blogging to do over the coming weeks. This blog has been quieter over the past few weeks anyway, and with the current situation most of what I post seems increasingly irrelevant. At the moment, I don’t feel I have anything to add to the chorus of commentary about coronavirus itself, despite the connection to some themes of my previous work – Foucault’s work on medicine and public health, surveillance and so on; Canguilhem’s interest in biology and medicine; Shakespeare on contagion…

So, I’m torn. It’s having an effect on my own work, in a very minor way, with the cancellation of some talks and all forthcoming archival work. But I am still trying to do some writing, and had an update on the work I’ve recently done for The Early Foucault ready to post. I also have a couple of recordings of talks that I was planning on sharing. So, some degree of normal service, or inappropriate in the current situation? Comments welcome.

Update: I should have added that in 2014-15 I put together a reading list on the Ebola crisis. This was because of a personal connection to what was happening, and a sense that there wasn’t a comparable place providing links. I did give one short talk on Ebola, and it’s continued to be part of my Geopolitics Today teaching at Warwick.