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This study develops the water requirement factors for different thermo-chemical and biochemical biomass conversion pathways for production of biofuels and biopower. Twelve biomass conversion pathways based on six biomass feedstocks are assessed. For all these pathways integrated water and energy requirement factors are developed. The biomass feedstocks considered for bioethanol production are corn, wheat, corn stover, wheat straw, and switchgrass. The biomass feedstock considered for biodiesel production is canola seed. Three biomass feedstocks are considered for biopower generation using direct combustion of biomass and bio-oil produced from the feedstocks through fast pyrolysis. These three feedstocks are corn stover, wheat straw and switchgrass. The water requirement is also evaluated for biofuels production based on wheat, wheat straw and canola seed in Alberta. Agriculture residues based ethanol production pathways are water and energy efficient, consuming only 0.3 liters of water per MJ of net energy value (NEV), whereas biopower pathways consume about 1.2 1.5 liters of water per MJ of NEV due to their lower energy efficiency. The pathway for producing ethanol from switchgrass is the most energy efficient, but consumes 117 liters of water per MJ of NEV. Producing biopower through the direct combustion of switchgrass and from combustion of switchgrass based bio-oil consumes 278 and 344 liters of water per MJ of NEV, respectively. Wheat and corn based ethanol production pathways consume 653 and 409 liters of water per MJ of NEV, respectively. Canola seed based biodiesel production pathway consumes 176 liters of water per MJ of NEV. Water demand in Alberta due to biofuels production will be 12.7% higher than the projected demand in 2025, but it can be met using existing resources. / Engineering Management

Thesis advisor: James Bernauer / Michel Foucault's account of power does not foreclose the possibility of ethics; on the contrary, it provides a inescapable framework within which ethics becomes possible. A clear elaboration of both the general features common to all kinds of power relations (Chapter One), as well as the evolution of particular modes of modern power (discipline and biopower, Chapters Two and Three) demonstrates how power relations both frame and require other, ethical relations. Foucault's articulation of these ethical possibilties (Chapter Four) follows several trajectories--some rooted in contemporary politics, others in ancient ethical practices--that begin with "bodies and pleasures," and move through the communal practice of friendship, to caring for oneself and others as a critical attitude. At the core of these interconected ethical trajectories are the interwoven concepts of critique and freedom, which give Foucault the resources to articulate a provisional but sufficient justification of ethical norms and values, thus answering his most incisive and significant critics. Foucault is thus a critical theorist whose work calls us not to despair but to hope in an ongoing struggle for the good and the just. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This study explores the extent to which the implementation of the National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning by the Peruvian Government had consequences in the lives of women who underwent sterilizations. This study is based on a feminist methodology and used interviews as a method of data collection in order to privilege women’s voices and lived experiences from a gender perspective. It addresses notions of biopower and the concept of reproductive health within a framework of intersectionality. Finally, by linking women’s testimonies with the theoretical framework, it was possible to identify that specific Peruvian women, in vulnerable and poor conditions, were targeted by the Government because they did not represent the idea of development, and since then, women are dealing with physical, emotional, and social consequences.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate how processes of subjectification constitute the empowered citizen/patient in the discourses on smart cities. Descriptions of smartphone apps which use environmental sensor data are analysed through discourse analytic approach to governmentality. More specifically the thesis investigates the empowered citizen in relation to responsibilisation and relations to knowledge and power. The study finds that the citizen-subject is responsibilised and the relations knowledge are reformulated and redistribute responsibility. Data and the derived knowledge is represented as a form of empowerment. The citizen-subject is constituted as a manager of their own health, and a catalysts for changing the environment. Emphasising the importance of data and putting the user at the heart of data collecting further contributes to the responsibilisation. However, as the information from the data streams is transferable it also redistributes responsibility in the network of individuals who have access to it. The way of knowing the self and the environment is augmented to include a codified interface, which conditions the relationship. A distributed network of sensors allows the citizen-subject is able to simultaneously read the environment in multiple locations. Relations in knowledge production are also found to be altered.

Building on Critical Art Ensemble’s initial formulation of the data body, and on Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson’s concept of surveillant assemblages, my thesis explores a further articulation of digital subjectivity by examining ‘data body’ as a referent for the various data connections and layers that a neoliberal subject is presumed to gather and generate over the course of a day. The flesh is bound to and by this data, as many examples indicate data’s ability to expand, spread, “go viral” and have a discernible effect on a user’s practical existence. My thesis deals with the ways that disciplinary and security logics are at work in these digital spaces and how they establish a tertiary regime, as outlined by Foucault. By considering the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed to support my assertion of bodies as situated and institutionally validated by technology, I discuss the modulation of affects such as fear and threat to establish modes of conduct mediated by the data bodies of their users.

No / This article applies Foucault’s ideas on Power –specifically biopower as a tool to explain sovereignty, jurisdiction and control over persons in outer space. This approach will hopefully illuminate the general nature and essence of ‘statist’ regulation of outer space activities. We believe that Foulcaut’s analysis of biopower -a tool of critical law scholarship can help to forensically explain the governing dynamics of the jurisdiction ratione personae exercised by states in outer space under the modern Westphalian model of sovereignty. The approach will also aid in prescribing sustainable and progressive policy directions for national regulatory agencies in space. Foucauldian approaches would help reveal both the considerable strengths and of course, the limitations and perhaps inequities of national regulation in space. This exercise will also hopefully indicate quite clearly why networks of international agencies and private corporations ought not be able to displace core aspects of statist manifestation of regulatory power in outer space. The article attempts to free jurisdiction from its semantic legalese in space law and make it encompass philosophy, sociology and jurisprudential influences while at the same time restricting the exploitative purposes to which both jurisdiction and biopower can be pressed in outer space.

This essay researches current workings of medicine in relation to contested, female diagnoses. This is made by looking at the construction of the new psychological diagnosis Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) in Swedish media, and relating it to a current trend seen in medicine; to medicalize women’s underperformance. A qualitative content analysis of 19 articles is conducted, showing that PMDD is constructed as; a biomedical fact and individual problem; a serious disease owned by the sufferers; and as something written out of the women’s self-image as a “not me”. These constructions are analysed with a theoretical framework built around the concept biomedicalisation, which we conceptualise as an exertion of biopower that shapes subjects in line with neoliberal ideals. Biopower is a concept from the Foucauldian notion of Governmentality, and describes power working on micro levels, through for example truth discourses, to make individuals understand and work on themselves as biological subjects. Our analysis shows that biopower can be seen to work through the different constructions of PMDD to shape self-managing, healthy subjects that are willing to biomedically change themselves in accordance with an ideological normal, but that this normal differs from that seen in research on other contested female diagnoses. To conclude we suggest that it would be more fruitful to look at biomedicalisation to understand current workings on female contested diagnoses, than to look at the trend on medicalisation of underperformance.

[pt] O presente estudo aborda o pensamento de Winnicott, buscando nele uma outra concepção da relação indivíduo/ sociedade distinta daquela que predomina hoje em nosso cenário social. A sua idéia de uma vitalidade espontânea e das condições necessárias para sua plena expressão contrasta com os dispositivos do biopoder descritos por Foucault que se apropriam da vida de modo a maximizar sua utilidade econômica. Ao mesmo tempo, a sua suposição de uma subjetividade que só pode emergir e diferenciar-se a partir da consistência do ambiente contrasta com a experiência de desamparo e vulnerabilidade descrita por Castel como característica do homem contemporâneo. Além disso, a noção winnicottiana de uma capacidade de preocupação com o outro que não depende de coerções e controles, mas de um ambiente cuidadoso internalizado, muito se aproxima das últimas análises de Foucault que tratam do cuidado de si antigo. Em tais análises, a ética greco-romana é entendida como expressão de liberdade, sendo retomada no presente sob a forma da amizade. Tanto Winnicott quanto Foucault sustentam a idéia de uma abertura potencial do indivíduo para o outro, mas é o primeiro autor quem, reconhecendo claramente as necessidades e tendências naturais da vida criativa, sem fechá-la em padrões normativos, nos permite criticar, por outro lado, o novo ideal de um sujeito totalmente aberto às demandas externas. / [en] The current study deals with Winnicott`s thought, searching in it another conception of the individual/society relationship, different from the one that prevails today in the social scenario. His idea of a spontaneous vitality, and the necessary conditions for its full expression, opposes the biopower mechanisms described by Foucault that take life in a way to maximize its economic use. At the same time, his assumption of a subjectivity that can only emerge and differentiate itself supported by a consistent environment opposes the helplessness and vulnerability experience described by Castel as characteristic of the contemporaneous man. Besides that, Winnicott´s notion of a capacity of concern with the other that does not depend on coercion and controls, but on an internalized careful environment, seems very close to Foucault latest analysis that deals with the concern of self in antiquity. In such analysis, the Greek-Roman ethics is understood as the expression of freedom, being recovered to the present in the form of friendship. Both Winninicott and Foucault support an idea of a potential openess of the individual to the other, but the former is the one who, clearly recognizing the needs and natural trends of creative life, without closing it in normative standards, allows us to criticize the new ideal of a subject completely open to the external demands.