Biofutures: Race and the governance of health

Abstract

This article addresses biomedical forms of racial targeting under neoliberal biopolitics. We explore two racial targeting technologies: The development of race-based pharmaceuticals, specifically BiDil; and medical hot spotting, a practice that uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies and spatial profiling to identify populations that are medically vulnerable in order to facilitate preemptive care. These technologies are ostensibly deployed under neoliberal biopolitics and the governance of health to affirm life. We argue, however, that these efforts further subject racial minorities-and specifically black subjects-to the cost-benefit logics of neoliberalism in the U.S. health care system and enduring anti-blackness. What is called for is an abolitionist biomedicine that recognizes and seeks to challenge the multifarious ways that race is ontologized as a corporeal and/or spatial truth while attending to the very real embodied effects of structural racism.

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…As Brown et al (2012Brown et al ( : 1607 have convincingly argued, neoliberal regimes deploy this notion 'to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change, and the individual lifecourse'. This observation is important for my purposes, because later on in the paper I will discuss in some detail the underappreciated relationship between global, collective futures and personal futures (see also Krupar and Ehlers, 2017;Olund, 2017;Oswin, 2014;Schurr, 2017;Smith and Vasudevan, 2017;Wang, 2017). I shall argue that more detailed research on the constitutive role of surprise in people's personal futures is sorely needed if socio-spatial theorists are to capture 'the messiness of becoming, seeing transition through the scale of a life and important life events' (Worth, 2009(Worth, : 1050.…”

Reflecting on neoliberal natures: An exchange

“…Along these lines, Pasternak (2016) links present neoliberal austerity to the much longer, racialized histories of settler colonialism in Canada, austerity is a long-standing tool of colonialism. More broadly, such scholars emphasize that colonial and racial hierarchies are foundational to the workings of capitalism and to the workings of liberalism, and thus also, to neoliberalism (for recent work in this vein see Krupar and Ehlers, 2017, McClintock, 2018, Pettygrove and Ghose, 2018).…”

Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab: 21st Century Mobilisations of Genetics—Introduction to the Special Issue

“…And, in the more contemporary context, we see examinations of the geneticisation and molecularisation of race in the biosciences and biomedicine (Bliss 2012 ; Nelson 2016 ; Koenig et al 2008 ; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010 ). A second trajectory of scholarship has sought to identify what race is made to do : that is, how race functions and how it is operationalised in the context of the biosciences, biomedicine, and contemporary biotechnologies (Benjamin 2014 ; Braun 2014 ; Duster 2003 ; Epstein 2007 ; Hatch 2016 ; Kahn 2013 ; Krupar and Ehlers 2017 ; M’charek 2020 ; Nelson 2008 ; Pollock 2012 ). In this area of work, race is viewed as concept or indeed a political technology that has been deployed or called on in ways that actualise certain outcomes—whether that be to reinscribe notions of ‘biological difference', structurally created health inequalities, and skewed life-chances, or to problematise the very notion of race and its effects.…”