Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-85).

Orientador: Pedro Angelo Pagni / Banca: Alexandre Simão de Freitas / Banca: Divino José da Silva / Banca: Rodrigo Pelloso Gelamo / Banca: Rodrigo Barbosa Lopes / Resumo: Seguindo coordenadas de uma perspectiva geofilosófica da educação brasileira, a presente tese procura encontrar ferramentas de resistência docente face aos regimes de governamentalidade biopolítica, através do recurso genealógico e cartográfico das principais linhas que dizem respeito à noção de ethos. Desse modo, em um primeiro momento, apresentamos o problema da pesquisa em função de três linhas extraídas do pensamento de Deleuze e Guattari - a dura (molar), a flexível (molecular) e a de fuga (ruptura) - que, ao serem aproximadas da categoria de ethos, trazem um tensionamento das linhas de vida sob dois ângulos: 1) como biopolítica, no qual a vida é segmentada em função de linhagens raciais e capturada por dispositivos disciplinares e reguladores que atuam ao nível da governamentalidade do corpo-espécie; 2) como biopotência, na qual a vida se subtrai às formas de controle do biopoder a partir de sua imanência e singularidade. No segundo capítulo, traçamos dois olhares acerca da noção de ethos em função da questão racial no Brasil. No primeiro, versamos sobre uma genealogia apresentada na teoria antropológica em Oliveira Vianna (1883-1951) por meio de linhas molares, contidas na obra Raça e Assimilação (1932), as quais indicam estratégias de governamentalidade biopolítica segundo um projeto científico de um aprimoramento do "estoque eugênico" da população, visando cálculo de riscos, de eficiências e de aumento de força produtiva ao Estado brasileiro. Na passagem do primeiro ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Tracking the coordinates of a geophilosophyc perspective of brasilian education, the present thesis intends to find tools of teacher resistence in view of the biopolitical governamentability regime, through genealogical and cartographic references of the main lines that concerns to the idea of ethos. Thereby, we'll present the problem starting from three lines extracted from Deleuze and Guatarri - the hard (molar), the flexible (molecular) and the flight line - which, when approached to the idea of ethos, are tension the lines of life by two angles: 1) as biopolitical, in which the life is segmented because of racial lineage and captured by disciplinary and regulator devices that act through the body-specie govermentability; 2) as biopotencial, in which life subtracts itself from the biopower control, through its singularity and immanence. In chapter two, we present two perspectives over the idea of ethos, under the racial issue in Brasil. In the first one, we'll talk a genealogy presented in the anthropological theory of Oliveira Viana through molar lines (1883- 1951), at Raça e Assimilação, which indicates strategies of a biopolitical governamentability according to a scientific project over an enhancement of the "eugenic stock" of the population, in order to calculate risks, efficiencies and increase of productive strength of Brazilian state. Next, we 'll follow a genealogical movement starting from the idea of racial struggle in In defense of society (1976), from Foucault... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Pedro Machado Camarote.pdf: 610532 bytes, checksum: 418c07eee417cd4f876f44ebe57779a7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-04-02 / Foucault´s concept of biopolitics, situated at the intersection of political practices and medical fields, sexuality, race wars, security and the economy, allows us to understand certain forms of action by the establishment upon life in contemporary societies. The section that was presented indulges the author´s criticism towards the economically oriented and repressive representations of the establishment, as well as the transformations that occurred in the transition from sovereignty to bio-power. Furthermore, it seeks to show the mechanisms of life extension that came about from social medicine and the sexual device, and runs through some of the revelations on the matter in Foucault´s work / O conceito de biopolítica em Foucault, situado no cruzamento de práticas políticas e os campos da medicina, da sexualidade, da guerra de raças, da segurança e da economia permite compreender certas formas de ação do poder sobre a vida nas sociedades contemporâneas. O recorte apresentado privilegia a crítica do autor às representações economicistas e repressivas do poder, assim como as transformações ocorridas na passagem do regime de soberania ao do biopoder. Além disso, procura mostrar os mecanismos de majoração da vida surgidos a partir da medicina social e do dispositivo de sexualidade, e percorre alguns desdobramentos da questão na obra de Foucault

Using discourse analysis, this study will apply a critical theoretical framework and discuss how perceptions of the Tanzanian national borders compares to problematized understandings of the socially constructed concepts of borders, sovereignty, and power. For example, the Tanzanian borders will be reassessed into something creating a safe ‘inside’ opposing an unsafe ‘outside, and into something dividing territories, thus, giving birth to the identities of ‘nationality’. Furthermore, the presence of biopolitical interventions will be discussed in order to see how biopower can help increase security in Tanzania. More substantially, the phenomena of roadblocks will be analysed as something potentially functioning as ‘extended arms’ of the national border. The analysis showed how the so called ‘geopolitical imaginary’, where borders are defined as the outer reaches of a sovereign state, is a well-established idea in Tanzania; the national borders were perceived as important and worthy of protection. However, they can also be seen as something ultimately creating non-coherent ‘insides’ and an ‘outsides’, where outside ‘threats’, often perceived as illegal immigrants, are dependent on the existence of territories. The analysis further showed that biopower in Tanzania is something which can create ‘social’ borders wherever there is authority. This form of exercised power does although suffer severely from corruption, and this leads to a conclusion that Tanzanian ‘security’, to a great extent, is being evaluated in terms of money.

Since the 1990s, a corpus of Arabic literary narratives has appeared that stage Europe from the perspective of forced migrants. This literature on refugees, asylum seekers, and clandestine migrants articulates central problems of migration to Europe in a period of migration policy reform in response to globalization. In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of Arabic and francophone North African literary narratives, including Mahmoud al-Bayaty's 2006 "Dancing on Water", Iqbal Qazwini's 2006 "Zubaida’s Window", Farouq Yousef's 2007 "Nothing and Nobody", Hamid Skif's 2006 "The Geography of Danger", Youssef Fadel's 2000 "Hashish", and Mahi Binebine's 1999 "Welcome to Paradise". This study is situated at the intersection of forced migration studies and Arabic literary studies. As the effort to standardize European migration policy and manage migration has increased states' power to filter and exclude, the human rights framework of migration policy has weakened (Fekete 2009; Menz 2008). Such shifts represent an intensification of what Michel Foucault calls "biopolitics," modern states' propensity to manage populations by producing belonging and exclusion (Foucault 2003). Literature of migration has become an important vehicle for reflecting on the ways that migration policies produce belonging and exclusion in contemporary Europe. Literature of forced migration requires modes of analysis that differ from the more modernist notions of exile that have dominated literary studies (Malkki 1995; McLeod 2000; Parvati 2010). In this study, I draw attention to the ways that literary narratives of migration re-figure Europe as a wilderness. The works that I analyze explore precarious migrant subjectivities through forests, urban jungles, and cannibalism, spaces onto which fantasies (and often nightmares) of the outside of political community can be projected Furthermore, I argue that wilderness provides sites of negotiation between the biopolitical and ideals of rights-based citizenship. While the biopolitical does not serve as a foundation of belonging in these narratives as suggested by some theorists (Agamben 2008), the literature posits new modes of belonging through the very exclusions produced by forced migration. / text

This thesis approaches Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) as a biopolitical problem, that is as a shifting scientific object which needs to be studied, classified and regulated. Assemblages of authorities, knowledges, and techniques make CFS subjects and shape their everyday conduct in an attempt to increase their supposed autonomy, wellbeing and health. CFS identities are, however, made not only through government, scientific and medical interventions but also by the patients themselves, a biosocial community that collaborates with scientists, educates itself about the intricacies of biomedicine, and contests psychiatric truth claims. CFS is a socio-medical disorder, an illness trapped between medicine, psychology and society, an illness that is open to debate, and therefore difficult to manage and standardise. CFS is, thus, more than a fixed and defined medical category; it is a performative and multiple category, it is a heterogeneous world. This thesis studies that performative complexity by assembling different pieces of empirical data that constitute its heterogeneity: medical and psychiatric journals and monographs, self-help books, CFS organisations’ magazines, newsletters and websites, illness narratives and social studies of CFS, CFS blogs, and qualitative interviews with diagnosed CFS patients and CFS activists. The thesis delineates different interventions by medicine, science, the state and the patients themselves and concludes that CFS remains elusive, only partially standardised, in an on-going battle between all the different actors that want to define it for their own situated interests.

This project is concerned with the role of the storyteller in the production and maintenance of human community. Starting with Roland Barthes's critique of romantic and modernist authorship in "The Death of the Author," I trace the parallels between literary and political authority in the globalized modern world, and ask if they mean that a revision of the author opens space for the reimagination of political community. To answer this question, I draw on recent discussions of cross-cultural comparison and theories of oral tradition to redefine literary voice and its relationship to modern textual authority. I then refer to the distinct cultural traditions that inform McCarthy, Hurston, and Young Bear to understand each author's focus on the material aspects of human speech, such as breath. The emphasis on these aspects of voice changes its use from a way to claim metaphysical certainty and political authority into a means for physical interaction that founds community in mutual vulnerability. The individual author thus becomes a participant in conversation, rather than one who intuits truth from the margins of human society, and the storyteller or political leader is able to take part in but not define the continuance of a given community. In making this argument, I use a study of poetics to ask students and teachers of modern American literatures to see the field as a site for the ongoing legislation of American community and identity, and suggest a method for engaging in comparative analyses that allows for the distinctiveness of different literary and cultural traditions while appreciating the possibilities in their resonating responses to the modern world.

This thesis is an investigation of representations of Mexico in twentieth century American and British literature. Drawing on various conceptions of biopolitics and biopower (from Foucault, Agamben and other theorists), I argue that the development of American pleasure tourism post-World War II has definitively transformed the biopolitical climate of Mexico for hosts and guests. Exploring the consolidation in Mexico of various forms of American pleasure tourism (my first chapter); cultures of vice and narco-tourism (my second chapter); and the erotic mixtures of sex and health that mark the beach resort (my third chapter), I posit an uncanny and perverse homology between the biopolitics of American tourists and Mexican labourers and qualify the neocolonial armature that links them together. Writers (from Jack Kerouac to Tennessee Williams) and intellectuals (from ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson to second-wave feminist Maryse Holder) have uniquely written contemporary “spaces of exception” in Mexico, have “founded” places where the normalizing discourses, performances of apparatuses of social control (in the U.S.) are made to have little consonance. I contrast the kinds of “lawlessness” and liminality white bodies at leisure and brown bodies at labour encounter and compel in their bare flesh, and investigate the various aesthetic discourses that underwrite the sovereignty and mobility of these bodies in late capitalism.

This thesis focuses on Hannah Arendt’s theory of natality, which is identified with the event of birth into a pre-existing human world. Arendt names natality the “ontological root” of political action and of human freedom, and yet, as critics of Arendt’s political writings have pointed out, this notion of identifying freedom with birth is somewhat perplexing. I return to Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of active human life in The Human Condition, focusing on the significance of natality as the disclosure of a unique “who” within a specific relational web. From there, I trace the distinct threats to natality, speech-action, and worldly relations posed by the political philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and by the modern biopolitical “rise of the social” on the other. Drawing connections between Arendt’s theory of the social and Michel Foucault’s work on the biopolitical management of populations, my thesis defends Arendt’s contentious distinction between social and political life; the Arendtian social, I argue, can fruitfully be read as biopolitical. / Graduate

In this work I illustrate the ways in which power structures function in operationalizing geographies of resistance in two particular carceral spaces. Specifically I examine the social organization and internal power relations present within hunger striking prison populations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. I show that the Guantanamo hunger strikes are minimally organized with non-binding power structures, while the Pelican Bay hunger strikes have had greater levels of commitment, and have been more sophisticated in organization. I consider the relationships that exist between power, identity and violence within these hunger strike resistance movements. I contextualize these phenomena within a biopolitical framework that transgresses more traditional definitions of biopolitics; as opposed to conceptualizing biopolitics as a technology of power manifested by the state, I argue that oppressed populations, such as prisoners, construct their own power by regulating their own ‘vital biological processes’.