Panels+and+Abstracts

Foucault’s description of tanatopolitics (Foucault 1975), or the power to give death, was inscribed under sovereign regimes. Modernity, in his genealogy, would be characterized by the deployment of biopolitics and disciplinary techniques as those to exploit and maximize the efficiency of life itself through the intimate regulation of -human- bodies. Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991), has criticized the model of Foucault for not being able to depict the present, one in which ‘ the informatics of domination’, where not old hierarchies but networks. Beatriz Preciado (Preciado 2013) expanded this explanation by arguing that the different techniques actually overlap in the present in form of verification apparatuses and added the neoliberal one as the commodifying of subjectivities through capitalist logics. Achielle Mbembe have argued that both biopolitics and necro-politics are two sides of the same coin in a time when warfare is over present through new forms of mass destruction and massacre. Following him, Rosi Braidotti extends the concern with the technological mediation of death to not only humans (Braidotti 2013). In 1996, Balsamo depicts a double-bonded present in which science and technology endorse dreams of eternity while, at the same time society lives what Braidotti names a ‘forensic turn’ (2013), one in which the fear of immanent and spectacular deaths due to natural disasters, epidemics or accidents is always present. In this panel we want to affirmatively address Braidotti’s necropolitics as a generative process. As she argues, we have passed from a humanist anxiety during the nuclear era to the fears of the Anthropocene that affects most of the species connecting us into a ‘transversal alliance’ (2013). In concrete, we want to participate with empirical, theoretical and speculative communications that touch, transverse or extend the following questions: - Which practices express death as generative? How to diffract them through an ethics of sustainability and inter-generational ethics?
 * PANEL || ABSTRACT ||
 * **Rethinking Necropolitics and the technologically mediated ways of dying in the Anthropocene.**

- How to turn the fear and spectacularization of the Anthropocene into political action?

- How to affirm the horrors of deaths into compassion, care, love and healing?

- How are different ways of dying distributed, commodified and resisted?

- Which species are allowed to survive and dye and for which criteria? How are different subjects inter-acting and ‘inter-killing’ (Braidotti, 2013)?

- Which practices allow for an extended posthumanist subjectivity in which death excess individual death to become part of a vitalist-material world?

- How are frontiers between organic/inorganic human/non-human death/life mobilized through necro-politics? ||  || Within the social studies of science and technology, it has been long the tradition of studying the production of knowledge. However, more recently, some have pay attention to the production of ignorance as paralleling, complementing or accompanying systems of knowledge within science and styles of thought. Proctor and Schiebinger ( 2008)coined the term ‘agnotology’ to refer to this phenomena of producing ignorance. Several studies have proposed different taxonomies of ignorance to account for the practice of sexualized, racialized and distributed ignorance. Among them, Tuana and Morgen’s study around the Women’s Health Movement (Tuana and Morgen 2006), Frickel’s and others around ‘undone science’, or that which is not produced but it is deemed as relevant by social movements (Frickel et al. 2010) or Kemper’s ‘forbidden research’ as that which is not conducted given taboos or sensitive topics (Frickel et al. 2010). Between notions of intentions or not, strategic or unconscious, structural or cognitive, a virtuous condition or a racialized production, authors on ignorance have brpught empirical cases in which certain subjects, topics, regions or ideas have been obscured and not researched and how some collectives have attempted to claim knowledge around them. In this view of ignorance as opposite to knowledge we want to question in this panel not only different cases on the production of ignorance but also the ethics and politics of ignorance and knowledge. What different questions and politics of ignorance do we find by not opposing it to knowledge but rather defining it through its practices, continuities and entanglements? How can we construct a field of ignorance and knowledge as always situated and what do we gain from that? In concrete we want to ask around the ethics of embracing both, knowledge and not knowing. Recent new materialisms have pointed to the benefits of knowing more in order to act better (Washick et al. 2014) and make better ‘agential cuts’ (Barad 2008). Others, such as Harvey Comier, point to the fact that knowing the truth of oppression will not change it and this it is to ask if knowledge and beliefs help to eliminate it, more than if it matches or not with reality (Sullivan and Tuana 2007). However, Tuana (2006) and Davis (2002), following Spivak, suggest the benefits of not knowing (as different from ignorance). Taking Spivak’s concept of ‘ethical singularity’, they argue that there is an excess and concealment in the encounter with the Other and thus, knowledge should be constituted by its own limitations. Davis ethics do not embrace ignorance but rather the ability to engage with what escapes propositions and representation (2002, 155). In this lines, we welcome communications that draw or exceed the following questions: This paper explores the killing of a dog, Excalibur, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Spain. When a nurse got infected in Madrid after treating a repatriated missionary who had contracted Ebola, her dog was subsequently killed by Spanish health authorities after being deemed a health security risk. To discuss how the event as intertwined with practices of knowledge, politics and citizenship, I analyze how news outlets reported the story. In my study, I show how Excalibur performed at least four different biorisks. I argue that it was ‘agnotology’ (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008), or the production of ignorance, which caused of his killing. During emergencies, possible futures need to be simplified to operationalize interventions (Luhmann, 1992). However, within ‘risks societies’ (Beck, 1992), preparedness and the use of statistics cannot address the timescapes complexities of global risks such as epidemics; those techniques are now often complemented by ‘imaginative enactments’ (Collier and Lakoff 2008) to construct possible futures. In the case of Excalibur, those enactments were entangled with ignorance production, resulting in the contested decision of killing him. Rather than addressing and operationalizing the different risks, the Spanish authorities collapsed the distinction between the Ebola-risks and Excalibur as a dog. This action rejects the possibility of treating Excalibur as a subject of intervention, knowledge, and care. I conclude that the case reveals a production of ignorance that is geographically situated and which was disputed within a context of austerity policies. Since politics have effects on non-humans, I call for a posthumanist approach in the management of biorisk interventions. || Mary Douglas (1982) inscribed risk within competing, and thus political, societal structures which would provide with the perceptions and meanings of risk to individuals. Ulrich Beck (1982) would describe contemporary societys as ‘risk societies’ in which older categories of inequality such as wealth, would be outdated and better understood in terms of risk distribution and risk aversion. Luhmann pointed out that risk management is conducted by reducing the complexity of emerging catastrophic visions of the future (1992). According to Luhmann, decisions around those hypothetic futures are taken by a few while their effects are beard by many others. From there, many scholars have drawn their research taking risk societies as granted. Studies arise around how to increase public participation in decision-making, how to account for the injustices of risk distribution, the harms and resistances of securitization and surveillance as parallels of risk societies, the production of the future in the present through simulations, preparedness and precaution techniques, and the turn to biorisks and biosecurity, among many others. They have in common a complex understanding of risk production and risk subjectivities as processes that go beyond the individual, the cognitive and the probabilities. And they also have in common a negative understanding of risk in a double sense: as something to be avoided -especially when it affects the most vulnerable populations- and as something that, in its avoidance, creates segregation, inequality and dystopian landscapes. In this panel we want to discuss risk from an affirmative perspective, that is, without neglecting the harms of risk managements, we want to diffract the concept and its practices towards positive critical understandings of risk. As a first inspiration, we want to highlight the work of Isabelle Stengers (Stengers 1997), for whom we need to put our objects of research ‘at risk’ of being redefined and multiplied. We invite communications that address, but not only, the following topics: - What are the ontologies of risk? - What are the boundary works that risk produce? - What are the mundane practices of addressing everyday risks? - What are the contemporary connections between risks/contamination/hybridity/purity/danger? - How do collectives organize around risk? - What are positive landscapes of risk? - How to become at risk? - If the Anthropocene places all the species at the same risk, what are the new forms of distribution and decision making that are being taking place? ||  ||
 * **Situated knowledges and ignorances, rethinking the ethics of (not) knowing the Other.**
 * How to do politics beyond representation and knowledge? Which forms of engagement scape knowledge?
 * How does knowledge promote (or not) social change?
 * What Others are being known in contemporary sciences and which are being ignored?
 * Which strategies do collectives (human and not human) practice to claim knowledge around forbidden/forgotten/forfeited/forsaken? || **Ignorance Killed the Dog. A posthumanist analysis of a biosecurity intervention during the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in Spain.**
 * **Rethinking risk in the Anthropocene, from danger and inequality to equality and possibility.**