Life has been problematized anew by recent social change and scientific innovation. There are important and little studied geographical dimensions to any such understanding of "the politics of life itself," however. A geographical perspective involves, first, highlighting the spatial aspects of both states and capital, two rather neglected dimensions of vital politics. Elaborating the geographical constitution of vital politics entails further describing the related powers of knowledges and practices. Reflecting on the geographical dimensions of longevity and health leads directly to a recognition of the ethical implications of the geographical luck of birth and residence. Taking up this ethical challenge requires specifying at least six components of geographical justice: culpability, fairness, care, state failure, human rights, and solidarity with environmental and social justice. Key Words: biomedicine, care, health, inequality, justice, longevity, medical ethics. Otra vez, la vida adquiere dimensión problémica en virtud del cambio social y la innovación científica. Sin embargo, aunque existen importantes dimensiones geográficas para comprender "las políticas de la vida misma," muy escaso es el estudio hecho sobre el particular. Una perspectiva geográfica a este respecto implica, primero que todo, destacar los aspectos espaciales tanto de los estados como de sus capitales, dos expresiones de las políticas vitales hasta ahora muy marginadas. Elaborar la constitución geográfica de la política vital demanda describir con mayor profundidad los poderes relacionados de conocimientos y prácticas. El reflexionar sobre las dimensiones geográficas de longevidad y salud lleva directamente a un reconocimiento de las implicacioneséticas de la casualidad geográfica del lugar de nacimiento y residencia. Para asumir estos retoséticos se requiere especificar por lo menos seis componentes de justicia geográfica: culpabilidad, equidad, cuidado, falla del estado, derechos humanos y solidaridad con la justicia ambiental y social. Palabras clave : biomedicina, cuidado, salud, desigualdad, justicia, longevidad,ética médica. L ife is being politicized in new and novel ways today, especially in Western societies and especially with regard to some of the possibilities wrought by recent and rapid developments in the biological sciences. A growing number of geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists are exploring such "vital" issues as the social implications of neuroscience or the political and legal vortex surrounding regenerative medicine (Fischer 2003;N. Brown and Webster 2004;Wainwright et al. 2006). So, too, are they analyzing how life is being revalued (Collier and Ong 2005;Sunder Rajan 2006;Waldby and Mitchell 2007). Such nonphilosophical accounts of the politics of life (that is, accounts that are based primarily on ethnographic or sociological investigation rather than on a purely philosophical reflection) concern what we might call the form of life itself and how various technologies reconfigure it. Such work cons...
Images of catastrophe and the suffering of others form an important part of the contemporary western imagination. Such images trace the geography of an uneven world at the same time as they assert the moral and political horizons of liberal forms of care towards it. Drawing upon Foucault's notion of political rationality, I revisit the emergence of this distinctively liberal moral geography to show how a modern form of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2011) developed in concert with the rise of capitalism and the liberal state. In particular, I explore the processes that, during the course of the long 19th century, invoked both a market‐driven moral economy and a state‐driven political morality within humanitarian endeavour. The final part of the paper then applies these reflections on humanitarianism's past to its much‐debated present. I move away from what is sometimes a rather binary focus on humanitarianism as a problem of Western intervention in other spaces to draw attention instead to its strategic function as a ‘liberal diagnostic’: a recursive moral practice that helps constitute a liberal politics as much as it projects that politics onto other people and places. I sketch out the implications of this by examining some of the ways that contemporary humanitarianism fulfils this role with respect to issues of global order and capital accumulation.
The US government has presented Guantánamo Bay to the world through the lens of "exceptional sovereignty". This argument holds that international law does not apply at Guantanamo because while America has "complete authority" over the base "ultimate sovereignty" rests with Cuba. Many accounts rightly critical of the abuses of power taking place at Guantanamo similarly understand it as something wholly abnormal-a literal "non-place". But in falling back on this argument both the American position and many of its critics have tended to "black box" what is taking place within the camp. In this paper I suggest that we ditch any sort of critique that says Guantanamo is somehow outside of the law and instead replace this line of argument with a critical history of the deployment of a particular sort of Executive power there. From this perspective, Guantanamo is better understood as a rather more normal part of the current imperial moment and connected up in various ways to American imaginations and materialisations of power. As a way of exploring some of these connections in greater detail, I examine the construction of Guantanamo as a particular sort of social space by drawing upon the accounts of those who have been there: former guards, detainees and their defence lawyers.
Through a re-reading of my Ph.D. fieldwork on Cuba's biotechnology industry, I empirically pull apart the relationship between fieldwork practice and knowledge production as experienced in my research. I argue that reflexivity is an insufficiently critiqued concept and, as a result, that its widespread influence in contemporary fieldwork practice works to obscure the influence of "others", not just on the "doing" of research but on the conceptual development of the methodology itself. I make this argument by focusing on the various strategies I employed to actualise my research methodology, the problems I met with and the subsequent pull of my research in new directions. I cover such issues as gaining access, working in multiple locales across antagonistic polities, what happens when fieldwork goes wrong and the notion of "empirical drift". I use these issues to examine how I was actively constructing both my field and my research methodology at the same time and through others. I try to show how the fact that fieldwork can be simultaneously a lived experience, a socially constructed performance and an episteme accounts for much of its distinctive qualities as a milieu in which existing knowledge is put to the test, or added to. I argue that these same qualities allow it to be a deeply intertextual process, or a joint work between the researcher and the field. This, I suggest, warrants greater recognition.
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