“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS”: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America

To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand's COVID-19 lockdown

Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand's lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.

Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and Collaborations

The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic governance. Others find the term helpful in drawing attention to disastrous environmental change, inspiring a reinvigorated attention to the ontological unruliness of the world, to multiple temporal scales, and to intertwined social and natural histories. New forms of noticing can be linked to systems analytics, including capitalist world systems, structural comparisons of patchy landscapes, infrastructures and ecological models, emerging sociotechnical assemblages, and spirits. Rather than a historical epoch defined by geologists, the Anthropocene is a problem that is pulling anthropologists into new forms of noticing and analysis, and into experiments and collaborations beyond anthropology.

Affect, technoscience and textual analysis: Interrogating the affective dynamics of the Zika epidemic through media texts

Science and Technology Studies has become increasingly interested in the roles of affect and emotions in science and technology. Researchers have examined, for example, emotions in the production of scientific knowledge, patients' or users' affective experiences of technologies, and emotionally charged cultural representations of science. However, less attention has been paid to the underlying affective dynamics that connect these sites, experiences and representations. This article builds on the premises that, first, unpacking these underlying affective dynamics is pivotal to understanding emerging technoscientific phenomena, and, second, that such affective dynamics often need to be accessed through cultural texts such as media. This necessitates developing tools of textual analysis that can capture cultural emotions, affective intensities and the tensions and resonances that arise when affective intensities and culturally circulating emotions become entangled. To this end, the article develops methods of textual analysis through a case study: the affective dynamics underlying the Zika epidemic. Focusing on the New York Times coverage of the epidemic, the article identifies affective concentrations centering on temporality, invisibility, and the dissolution of material boundaries. It shows that there are considerable tensions both within and between these concentrations, and that such tensions engender affective intensities and emotional investments. By combining discursive and non-discursive dimensions of the affective dynamic of Zika, the analysis contributes to the growing STS methodological literature on affect and emotion in technoscience.

Reconstructing the citizen: Disaster, citizenship, and expertise in racial Guyana

This article examines the interlocking of nature and race within the overarching framework of the turn toward an idiom of ‘preparedness’ in disaster expertise in Guyana. Tracking the question of racial insecurity following disastrous floods in 2005, the article discusses disaster preparedness interventions as working against the country’s process toward postsocialist racial democratization. In this respect, disaster preparedness has had contradictory effects on security and has enacted a sort of public critique and humor about its inaptness. On the basis of this ethnographic case, the article argues that a practice and language of preparedness is as much about technocratic know-how as it is a style of political humor itself. In this theorization, preparedness is more than contingent, and so is a necessary temporal moment in which people work to imagine a new relationship to nature in recognition of their everyday life molded to environmental and racial-political vulnerability.

Circulating tears and managing hearts: Governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory

This article argues that moderate Islamic spiritual training programs in contemporary Indonesia entail ‘governing through affect’. This formulation captures the embodied dispositions and ritual forms through which affect is mobilized to serve as a modality of government. Based on over two years of ethnographic research in Indonesia, most of which took place at Krakatau Steel in western Java, I examine the affective incitements that took place in ritual settings dedicated toward corporate productivity and self-improvement. The article argues that this process of subjectification took place in three stages. First, what participants referred to as ‘opening the heart’, which involved making participants receptive to the message of work as worship through recourse to affective enactments in Islamic history and discourse. Second, the circulation of tears, which refers to deep collective weeping which simultaneously represented and physically enacted the adoption of a new subjectivity. Finally, ‘managing the heart’ — the ultimate goal of spiritual training — was a form of self-management in which one exercised ‘built-in control’ and acted in ways that were deemed simultaneously conducive to corporate competitiveness and other-worldly salvation. I conclude that affect constitutes the virtuality of ritual insofar as it is the medium through which spiritual reform enters into the vital processes of human life.