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Gilles Deleuze was a continental philosopher (born, Paris 1925, died, Paris 1995) whose radical work has influenced a wide range of disciplines across social science, humanities, material science, technology and applied disciplines such as education, architecture, art and design. Many in social work will have an affinity with the way that his difficult early experience informed his values and activism. His childhood was defined by the traumatic loss of his brother Georges; a fighter for the French resistance during WW2 who died whilst being transported to a German concentration camp. Deleuze' parents idolised his older brother and left him feeling overlooked. As a result he rejected family life and his parents right wing political views and developed an affinity with the growing strength of the working class. His earliest work poses questions of widely held views on religion, gender and capitalism. As a student he defined his own path, exploring unfashionable scholarship and troubling accepted norms. He rejected elitism based on economic structures, cultural hierarchies and intellectual practices which limit imagination and freedom (Dosse, 2010). This radical position defined the catalogue of work which he would go on to produce alone and with his collaborator Felix Guattari. He published volumes on philosophers Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant and Hume; artists, Proust, Artaud and Bacon each of whom provided the inspiration for his distinctive thought. More than any, he used the work of the 17th century rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza whom he described as the 'Christ of philosophers'. His most widely influential work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983, 1987) was co-authored with Felix Guattari. Its two volumes overturn the dominant voices of Marx and Freud offering a different perspective on resistance to inequality; one which is based in creative affirmation. His intention to disrupt habits of thought is conveyed by the unusual terminology he used to express his ideas - the lexicon of 'war machines', 'bodies without organs', 'nomads', 'assemblages', rhizomes' and 'planes of immanence'.

Drawing on Roberto Esposito's conceptualization of 'affirmative biopolitics', this article examines the relationship between bedbugs and humans in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Through an analysis of ethnographic field notes and interviews with people who live in the area, this article traces their experiences from first encounters. The trajectory of this experience shows a shift from a desire to immunize their homes through total annihilation of the creatures to the more pragmatic position of learning how to live with them through an orientation toward 'shared vulnerability'. This case study raises interesting questions for biopolitical theory: how can we conceive of affirmative biopolitics when the limitations of species being are evident, and is it possible to conceive of a multi or even interspecies munus or obligation?

As a central strand of the 4th International Visual Methods Conference (IVM4 took place in Brighton 2015 with a focus on critical approaches, narrative and visual research methods), Digital Storytelling was represented as a model of participatory research with significant potential for emancipatory impact. Joe Lambert founder and Executive Director of the Story Center (formerly Centre for Digital Storytelling) gave a keynote presentation; there were also a significant number of parallel presentations that reported research from digital storytelling practices. Many of these drew on the methods proposed by the Story Center which position this practice as socially transformative. However, the ways in which this vein of digital storytelling is couched within Freire's Hegelian teleology generates a range of ethical problems. Freirean approaches rest on a humanist notion of the dialectic of recognition and when translated to the level of the collective, this ends in a problematic model of collective identity, which is ultimately exclusionary and particularistic. More recent thinking on the commons by Italian theorists (Esposito, 2010; Hardt and Negri, 2011; Agamben, 1993) continues the struggle for liberation but sidesteps these problems through a rethinking on how the commons is formulated. Read in conjunction with Rancière's aesthetic politics these ideas offer alternative possibilities for participation by artists interested in emancipation and resistance.

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?

This article contributes a comparative review of social work in Canada and Scotland to international conversations about social work and the environment. The 'environmental question' of the 21st century is a radical challenge to social work developed in relation to the 'social question' of the 19th century. Work to begin to include the natural environment within high-income state social work can expect to encounter established infrastructures of thinking and doing that will be difficult to shift. We, therefore, compare guiding social work policy documents and identify points of tension that are likely to be shared across wealthy national contexts.

The leaching of organotin (OT) heat stabilizers from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes used in residential drinking water systems may affect the quality of drinking water. These OTs, principally mono‐ and di‐substituted species of butyltins and methyltins, are a potential health concern because they belong to a broad class of compounds that may be immune, nervous, and reproductive system toxicants. In this article, we develop probability distributions of U.S. population exposures to mixtures of OTs encountered in drinking water transported by PVC pipes. We employed a family of mathematical models to estimate OT leaching rates from PVC pipe as a function of both surface area and time. We then integrated the distribution of estimated leaching rates into an exposure model that estimated the probability distribution of OT concentrations in tap waters and the resulting potential human OT exposures via tap water consumption. Our study results suggest that human OT exposures through tap water consumption are likely to be considerably lower than the World Health Organization (WHO) "safe" long‐term concentration in drinking water (150 μg/L) for dibutyltin (DBT)—the most toxic of the OT considered in this article. The 90th percentile average daily dose (ADD) estimate of 0.034 ± 2.92 × 10−4μg/kg day is approximately 120 times lower than the WHO‐based ADD for DBT (4.2 μg/kg day).

Determining the probabilistic limits for the uncertainty factors used in the derivation of the Reference Dose (RfD) is an important step toward the goal of characterizing the risk of noncarcinogenic effects from exposure to environmental pollutants. If uncertainty factors are seen, individually, as "upper bounds" on the dose‐scaling factor for sources of uncertainty, then determining comparable upper bounds for combinations of uncertainty factors can be accomplished by treating uncertainty factors as distributions, which can be combined by probabilistic techniques. This paper presents a conceptual approach to probabilistic uncertainty factors based on the definition and use of RfDs by the US. EPA. The approach does not attempt to distinguish one uncertainty factor from another based on empirical data or biological mechanisms but rather uses a simple displaced lognormal distribution as a generic representation of all uncertainty factors. Monte Carlo analyses show that the upper bounds for combinations of this distribution can vary by factors of two to four when compared to the fixed‐value uncertainty factor approach. The probabilistic approach is demonstrated in the comparison of Hazard Quotients based on RfDs with differing number of uncertainty factors.

This paper presents an approach for characterizing the probability of adverse effects occurring in a population exposed to dose rates in excess of the Reference Dose (RfD). The approach uses a linear threshold (hockey stick) model of response and is based on the current system of uncertainty factors used in setting RfDs. The approach requires generally available toxicological estimates such as No‐Observed‐Adverse‐Effect Levels (NOAELs) or Benchmark Doses and doses at which adverse effects are observed in 50% of the test animals (ED50s). In this approach, Monte Carlo analysis is used to characterize the uncertainty in the dose response slope based on the range and magnitude of the key sources of uncertainty in setting protective doses. The method does not require information on the shape of the dose response curve for specific chemicals, but is amenable to the inclusion of such data. The approach is applied to four compounds to produce estimates of response rates for dose rates greater than the RfD

Over the last 10 years, a number of researchers have used Monte Carlo analysts to investigate the variation in long‐term average dose rates in exposed populations and the uncertainty in estimates of long‐term average dose rates for specific individuals. In general, these researchers have modeled long‐term exposures using simple dose rate equations which assume that individuals are exposed to a single environmental concentration at a constant rate over a specified exposure duration. This paper presents an alternative approach for modeling long‐term average exposures called microexposure event modeling which addresses a number of shortcomings in traditional dose rate equations. The paper discusses the limitations of the traditional dose rate equation, presents a description of the methodology, and illustrates advantages of the approach with a case study.