This article seeks to unpack notions of governmentality by reading it through the case of nature. By highlighting three key aspects of governmentality -its analytics of power, biopolitics, and technologies of the self -I argue that this approach presents a promising theoretical trend for those who study nature and its rule. However, there have been critiques leveled at this approach which must be considered. Using examples drawn from human/non-human interactions, I explore how the governmentality literature needs to be made more complex and attune to difference. In the final analysis, I argue that the concept of governmentality is not only an effective tool for geographers, but that geography provides a particularly insightful lens with its attention to spatiality, scale, territory and human/non-human relations that enrich the analysis of the making of governable spaces.
This article considers the irreducible indeterminacy of the coywolf and how this shapes human perceptions of the animal, as well as attempts to manage it. The hybridity of the coywolf matters very much to its interactions with humans, as well as the panic that has ensued over its evolutionary success. They are genetic and morphological intermediaries, an admixture of western coyote, eastern wolf, and dog. They hunt in packs like wolves but demonstrate a fearlessness to humans more common of coyotes. They thrive in urban or semiurban environs, moving along our highway, transit, and green space systems in search of food and shelter. I suggest it is the putative ferality of the coywolf—its margin—dwelling between urban and wild, between wolf and coyote—that disrupts our prevailing narratives about how, and on whose terms, animals can occupy the world. But it is also an animal that offers an opening to think about mutual flourishing. I contend this is a fruitful place to start tackling the questions raised by the Anthropocene, and reimagining all creatures as cotravelers.
Environmentality, or green governmentality, offers a way of thinking about how power works through the construction of the environment, its problems, and the solution to those problems. The concept emerged in the 1990s and has been applied to a wide array of environmental questions. Environmentality is most keenly focused on how regimes of truth are made, how strategies of regulation are formed, and how human subjectivities are enacted with reference to the environment.
This article is the second of a two‐part exploration of the question of biopolitics and its importance to social geography. First, this paper examines two main threads—biopolitical geopolitics and vital geographies—to think about the different ways this analytical register has been applied. Next, we draw on our own research and that of others to suggest the possibilities for an affirmative biopolitics. Finally, we contend that geography is well‐placed to continue pushing the boundaries of biopolitical research, with particular reference to an area that has received little attention thus far: biopolitics and the non‐human.
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