Getting Away with Murder: Unpacking Epistemic Mechanisms of Necropower and Disposability in North America

Unlearning organized numbness through poetic synesthesia: A study in scarlet

“…The normalization of violence, of the sight of blood, of death, results in extremely effective desensitization. Epistemologically speaking, although hard to accept, we must face the fact that we are largely the authors of a carefully calculated and highly efficient organization of death and destruction (Banerjee, 2008; Bloomfield et al, 2017) morphed into spectacle, resulting in daily empirical manifestations fueling our shared collective imaginary, instantly propagated by media and simultaneously anesthetizing us, numbing us, to the point that we are no longer neither surprised, nor even appalled (Pérezts, 2021). Valencia (2010) uses the cinematographic genre term “gore” to qualify the shape capitalism is taking under these premises, visibilizing and normalizing mutilation and violence in the bloodiest way possible, with our increasing desensitization calling for an ever more intense representation of violence, in order to maintain its “shock value.” Its monstruosity (Thanem, 2006) accounts for and sustains death’s increasing lucrativeness, gauged by the metrics of productivity, performance, and efficiency (McCann, 2017).…”

Business Ethics Quarterly Special Issue on: Organizational Ethics of Life and Death

“…• How do organizational processes of biopower (Fleming, 2014;Foucault, 2008) and death (i.e., necropolitics [Mbembe, 2019[Mbembe, , 2020), necro and gore capitalism (Banerjee, 2006(Banerjee, , 2008Valencia, 2018) challenge organizational ethics today, including within the conceptual frames legally sanctioned rules of dominant institutions (Maitland, 2002;Pérezts, 2021)?…”

“…Who/what is left exposed? Who/what remains forgotten (including human populations and non-human entities)? How to overcome the normative shortcomings of approaches that privilege certain stakeholders while leaving others unrecognized (Derry, 2012; Painter, Pérezts, & Deslandes, 2021)? How do organizational processes of biopower (Fleming, 2014; Foucault, 2008) and death (i.e., necropolitics [Mbembe, 2019, 2020]), necro and gore capitalism (Banerjee, 2006, 2008; Valencia, 2018) challenge organizational ethics today, including within the conceptual frames legally sanctioned rules of dominant institutions (Maitland, 2002; Pérezts, 2021)? What can we learn from studying “spaces of death” such as border zones or refugee camps (Bauman, 2014; Biehl, 2005; Fotaki 2019b; Human Rights Watch, 2020; Estevez, 2021)? How can we use these spatial manifestations of dying and living divides to reimagine organizational ethics of life and death? What are the politics of recognizing the dangers to life posed by specific forms of work (e.g., frontline work, Hughes, 2019)? What are the ethical implications for governance of life and death, including issues of surveillance, curtailment of individual and collective rights, and privacy? How do the ethics of organizing biological or “bare” life relate to socialized, political visions of life?…”