Necropolitics Covered

Call and response

Goldberg, D. T. (2010) ‘Call and response’, Patterns of Prejudice, 44(1), pp. 89–106. doi: 10.1080/00313220903507651. Abstract: Goldberg’s essay is an extended response to five reviews of his recent book The Threat of Race contributed by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Susan Giroux, Kelly Gillespie, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Peter Wade. Issues discussed range over the sadistic elements of racism’s characteristic violence, the ‘disappearance’ or ‘invisibility’ of race and the impact on racisms, the distinction and relation between naturalism and historicism in racial articulation, and the connection to biologism and culturalism, racial epistemologies, racial coloniality and racial neoliberalism. The central theme of the book, the notion of racial neoliberalism, is elaborated and exemplified by reference to the characterization of Obama by some since he was elected president of the United States. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

Stevenson, O., Kenten, C. and Maddrell, A. (2016) ‘And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning’, Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), pp. 153–165. doi: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1152396. Abstract: A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Doing research among exiled Rwandan army deserters: a reflexive narrative

Ncube, F. (2025). Doing research among exiled Rwandan army deserters: a reflexive narrative. Social Dynamics, 51(1), 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2025.2593069 [https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2025.2593069] This paper reflects on my experiences of doing research among ex-soldiers who deserted from the post-conflict Rwandan military, who believe that they are being “hunted” by their government, allegedly, for political reasons. It attends to practices of doing fieldwork among people whose normal lives are suspended by the perpetual need to navigate the daily threat of discovery by the long arm of the Rwandan state and the very real threat of violence and death in exile. I show how fear, as a profound ontological condition, can shape the process of research. I foreground the materiality of fear and propose that the interlocutors’ consciousness and sensitivity to the hazards that the field is infused with can influence the nature of ethnography. Through fear, politically sensitive research can produce moving ethnography, that is, a kind of ethnography in which the participants and researcher are in an enhanced state of sensory and nomadic comportment during fieldwork. Analysis of data draws mainly on insights from Vigh’s ideas on social navigation, Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics and Deleuzian ideas of the control society. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Transnational America: race, gender and citizenship after 9/11

Grewal, I. (2003) ‘Transnational America: race, gender and citizenship after 9/11’, Social Identities, 9(4), pp. 535–561. doi: 10.1080/1350463032000174669. This paper examines the racialisation and gendering of a collective subject described as ‘Middle Eastern or Muslim’ in the US media in the aftermath of 9/11. It examines how this category came to be visible and prominent through the workings of disciplinary power and forms of governmentality through the binary of freedom and unfreedom, necropolitics and the politics of security and freedom. Multiculturalism in the US, as it was articulated in consumer culture through the national spectacle of the flag, emerged as an example of this new form of governmentality that is both regulative and productive of American nationalism and transnationalism. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Dialogues with the Dead: Necropoetics of Zahra’s Paradise

Shams, F. (2020). Dialogues with the Dead: Necropoetics of Zahra’s Paradise. Iranian Studies, 53(5–6), 893–909. https://doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2019.1689809 What can the poetry chosen for epitaphs on graves tell us about the political and cultural development of post-revolutionary Iran and the politics of death and dying under the Islamic Republic? This article explores contemporary Persian epitaph poetry as a valuable medium for understanding the socio-political dynamics of Iranian society. By analyzing the epitaphs of the Iran–Iraq war martyrs, who are buried in Zahra’s Paradise public cemetery in Tehran (Behesht-e Zahra), a new nomenclature can be established for the religious, political and socio-cultural ideas underpinning death and the afterlife. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]