In this roundtable we aim to revisit the question of biopolitics - the politics over life - and to assess its contemporary relevance. In 2020 biopolitics has reemerged as a popular concept, as well as perhaps the best way to understand the COVID-19 global emergency. At the same time, biopolitics was already part of the public debate; in Greece, particularly, it was central to discussions in the last decade of constant crisis and austerity politics.

 

Through a panel of scholars from different disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we would like to invite insight on our contemporary biopolitical moment that will also be informed by a larger context of analysis: neoliberal population management and new social agendas; neonationalism and neofascism; moral panics and new borders; racism, homo/transphobia and gender violence; bio-industry and biocitizenship; archaeopolitics and the new past. 

  

 

 

Dimitris Plantzos (Νational and Kapodistrian University of Athens): A national bicentenary, a global pandemic, and the new past

Nelli Kambouri (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences): Biopolitics and care in the period of economic and health crises

Paul Apostolidis (London School of Economics & Political Science): Biopolitics, dangerous work and the dynamics of hegemony

Olga Demetriou & Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University): Facile biopolitics and (counter) resistance

 

Chaired by Dimitris Papanikolaou (Oxford University)