Suchergebnisse

This episode is about the biggest story of the decade so far, COVID-19, or the coronavirus. But its also an episode with someone I've been wanting to have on the show for a long time, Garnet Kindervater.



Before we get started, just a few observations about the politics of the coronavirus itself. I don't know if its fair to say viruses have a politics, but their human victims certainly do. And, as some of you may have been following, we've seen a big debate break out this week over a piece on the virus by Giorgio Agamben. Garnet and I don't talk about Agamben in this interview. At the time of recording, we were only just becoming aware of this debate. But I want to talk a little bit about it before we get started, as I think its relevant to the interview you're about to hear.



Agamben's basic position seems to be an extreme take on the libertarian left's impulse to read the state, or sovereignty, as a technology of control in itself. And so, for him, living in Italy in the midst of the state's effort to control coronavirus, there seems to be a natural connection between the way the state is expressing its power right now, isolating large portions of the population, and his overall thesis that since the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, government has become a permanent state of exception. Here's a quote:




"It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year … We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation."




Now, I'm not an epidemiologist. But neither is Agamben. So I am not sure how take this statement. According to the New York Times, the death rate among those contracting the seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S. Whereas estimates of the death rate among those contracting COVID-19 in China vary between 1.4% and 2.3%. In the literature, there's a lot of commentary about regional variation and stuff like that, but the bottom line is that Agamben does seem to be trivializing the matter to a degree that could be considered irresponsible, or even negligent.



Now of course, that's not to discredit Agamben's intellectual program necessarily. There's a long history of theorists making bad calls on specific controversies. But there have been number of replies published to Agamben. Two have stood out for me, and I want to mention them now as I think they'll maybe help listeners better understand the value of the interview.



The first piece that I thought worth mentioning is by Slavoj Zizek. In a piece published on the blog The Philosophical Salon on March 16, Zizek rebukes Agamben for what amounts to an "extreme form of a widespread Leftist stance of reading the "exaggerated panic" caused by the spread of the virus as a mixture of power, exercise of social control and elements of outright racism." For Zizek, however, Agamben's folly is not in the same breath an excuse for a return to some kind of idealized left authoritarianism. To the contrary, its a demand for a new, democratic form of communism. Whatever the successes of China in combating COVID-19, he says, we should be clear that the old communist model encourages corruption. The lesson to be learned here is therefore of a different order.



Longtime listeners will have heard me ramble sometimes about something called "socialist governmentality." This is a phrase coined by Foucault, though never really fully developed. What he seems to do, towards the end of Birth of Biopolitics, is suggest that socialism has always had to turn to liberalism or totalitarianism for its model of government. A true socialist governmentality, in this sense, has yet to be invented. So what would this novel form of government look like?

Welcome to another episode of Fully Automated!



Today, we're bringing you an interview with Dr. Vanessa Bilancetti, Lecturer in Political Sociology at UniNettuno University, in Rome. Vanessa is one of those rare scholars who can bring together Foucault and Marx, and apply them both to the interesting empirical questions of our time. In this episode, she'll be talking with us about how we can approach their scholarship as a toolbox for analyzing European Governmentality in the context of post-financial crisis political economy.



Vanessa's research interests include the European Union, financialisation, feminist political economy and critical European studies. I had the good fortune of meeting Vanessa at an online conference this summer, held by the Critical Political Economy Research Network. Vanessa was presenting a paper, called 'How to study the commodification of social services following a gender perspective.' Between sessions, we got talking about Foucault and how he is used in political economy, and I found Vanessa's take on the inherent compatibilities between Foucault and Marx to be really interesting. She later sent me some of her research, which I read, and .. well, that's when I decided I had to have her on for an interview!



Vanessa is an advocate of allowing the methods of Foucault with that of what she calls, "an anti-essentialist Marxism and a critical feminist political economy approach." So, in this interview you're going to hear me ask her to elaborate on that. We're also going to talk about the case studies she presents in her published work, on the European Fiscal Compact. I'm very grateful to Vanessa for coming on the show, and I hope you enjoy the conversation.



Before I sign off here, just wanted to thank everyone who shared and commented on last week's "special commentary episode" on the prominence of the K-Hive, in academia. Hope to do more of those "essay"-style pods, in the future.



We never ask for money for this show. However, if you enjoy it, please feel welcome to leave a rating on Apple Podcasts, or the podcast app of your choice. The ratings help improve the standing of the show, and help me book future guests for the show!

Contributor(s): Dr Stephen Roberts, Dr Leeza Osipenko, Professor Barbara Prainsack, Dr James Somauroo | With more and more information about us available electronically and online, this episode of LSE IQ asks, 'Is big data good for our health?'
Advances in bio-medical technologies, along with electronic health records and the information we generate through our mobile phones, Smart Watches or Fit bits, our social media posts and search engine queries, mean that there is a torrent of information about our bodies, our health and our diseases out there.
Alongside this, the tremendous growth in computing power and data storage means that this 'Big Data' can be stored and aggregated and then analysed by sophisticated algorithms for connections, comparisons and insights.
The promise of all of this is that big data will create opportunities for medical breakthroughs, help tailor medical interventions to us as individuals and create technologies that will speed up and improve healthcare.
And, of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic we've also seen some countries use data, generated from people's mobile phones, to track and trace the disease.
All of this poses opportunities for the tech giants and others who want to be part of the goldrush for our data - and to then sell solutions back to us
What are the risks in handing over our most personal data? Will it allow big data to deliver on its hype? And is it a fair exchange?
In this episode, Oliver Johnson speaks to Dr Leeza Osipenko, Senior Lecturer in Practice in LSE's Department of Health Policy; Professor Barbara Prainsack, Professor of Comparative Policy Analysis at the University of Vienna and Professor Sociology at King's College London; Dr Stephen L. Roberts, LSE Fellow in Global Health Policy in LSE's Department of Health Policy; and Dr James Somauroo, founder of the healthtech agency somX and presenter of The Health-Tech Podcast.

Research
Blockchain's potential to improve clinical trials by Leeza Osipenko
Big Data, Algorithmic Governmentality and the Regulation of Pandemic Risk by Stephen Roberts
Personalized Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? by Barbara Prainsack


Contributors
Dr Leeza Osipenko
Professor Barbara Prainsack
Dr Stephen L. Roberts
Dr James Somauroo

Welcome to another episode of Fully Automated! Our guest for this episode is Keir Milburn, Lecturer in Political Economy and Organization at the University of Leicester. Keir has a new book out, called Generation Left. I had a chance to discuss the text recently, with my Columbus, OH-based friends, Chairman Moe's Magic Contradiction (AKA Charlie Umland and Jim Calder). We liked it so much, we thought we'd reach out to Keir and see if he'd come on the show, to discuss.



American audiences may have heard Keir interviewed by Chuck Mertz a couple of weeks ago, on This Is Hell! We're kind of hoping this could be a good companion episode to that interview, as we go deep into some aspects of the book that Chuck didn't have time to address. And there is a LOT going on in this book! It starts by questioning the popular notion that Millennials and Zoomers are a bunch of entitled snowflakes, and suggesting that this myth is actually doing quite a lot of work, politically, in dividing young and old members of the working class, giving them over to the idea that they have fundamentally different interests.



But of course, as with many myths, an investigation of the facts produces a rather different persecutive. It turns out, says Keir, that the generations are stuck in rather different material trajectories. One statement Keir makes early in the book really caught our attention: "the older generation are still tied to the neoliberal hegemony of finance while the young seek to escape it." But these trajectories are not a given. To the contrary, the logic of neoliberalism forces the Boomer generation to hold onto its material advantages, as a retirement strategy. And, as it does this, it condemns Millennials and Zoomers to a life of debt and forces them into a culture of cynical entrepreneurialism.



In the show, we talk with Keir about the role of events in composing generations. Events, he says, can disrupt our accepted ways of making sense of the world, and lead to the emergence of radically new social energies. But not every disruptive event will necessarily lead to some kind of new configuration, nor will every new configuration necessarily be a progressive one.



One particular event, the 2008 financial crisis, of course looms large in Keir's story. Unleashing austerity on the developed world, it represents in a sense the apogee of neoliberal governmentality. Milburn cites academic theorists like Wendy Brown, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Jennifer Silva to try to explain how neoliberal capitalism tries to get us to think and act as if there is no alternative to neoliberalism, even tho we all know its not working — we know we can't all be entrepreneurs. (This reminded us a bit of Adam Curtis, and his hyper-normalization documentary). A key figure for Milburn here is Mark Fisher, and his argument about consciousness deflation.



Whatever we want to call this system (authoritarian neoliberalism? zombie capitalism?), clearly it is making us sick. Throughout the text, Milburn make repeated reference to how we are living in the midst of an epidemic of "depression, insomnia and mental distress." Yet there's kind of a mystery to unpack here. He cites Jennifer Silva, for example, to explain how capitalism prefers us to internalize these issues, making them questions more to to do with our emotional and psychic resilience, than anything to do with the structure of the economy.



And, as he argues, this way of thinking about our mental wellbeing even showed up in the "assemblyism" of the occupy Wall Street movement. Nevertheless, he insists, Occupy's approach to the collective discussion of experiences and struggles did offer therapeutic and even political potentials to the young people who participated. And, as we discuss in the show (admittedly not in nearly enough detail) there are things we can learn here, very much in the spirit of the late Mark Fisher, that might be applied to a new model of treating mental and ...