pp. 4866·29. decembar 2024.· Issue No. 1
Biopolitics and the body in the age of pandemics: a foucauldian inherited framework for the analysis of contemporary surveillance practices DOI: 10.65932/CR-2024-1-3Creative Commons BY 4.0 CC BY 4.0
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Biopolitics and the body in the age of pandemics: a foucauldian inherited framework for the analysis of contemporary surveillance practices
The article develops a critical analysis of how Foucault's inherited conceptual apparatus — disciplinary power, biopower, and governmentality — must be reconfigured to account for contemporary pandemic surveillance practices that operate simultaneously through corporate platform infrastructures, algorithmic data flows, and necropolitical distributions of harm. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that integrates a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2015 and 2023, comparative documentary analysis of the World Health Organisation's interim public-health surveillance guidance and the leading critical sociotechnical case studies of contact-tracing applications, biometric monitoring systems, and digital health passes, and conceptual decomposition of how the Foucauldian inheritance has been mobilised, contested, and extended in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The central finding is that contemporary pandemic surveillance operates through four structurally coupled layers — disciplinary surveillance of the individual body, biopolitical regulation of populations through statisticalepidemiological mechanisms, platform-mediated algorithmic surveillance produced by corporate technology actors, and necropolitical distribution of vulnerability across racialised, classed, and politically marginalised populations — and that no one layer can be analytically grasped in isolation from the others. The empirical pattern documented in the institutional indicators reveals that the surveillance practices instituted during the pandemic have not receded with the passing of the acute health emergency but have become naturalised through the recursive coupling of the four layers. The original contribution of this article is the introduction of the analytical framework of four-layer pandemic surveillance, which clarifies why classical accounts that mobilise only one or two of these layers cannot capture the structural specificity of contemporary biopolitical surveillance. The paper closes with implications for surveillance studies and political theory. Methodological limitations include reliance on aggregate institutional indicators and the English-language concentration of the source literature.

The article develops a critical analysis of how Foucault's inherited conceptual apparatus — disciplinary power, biopower, and governmentality — must be reconfigured to account for contemporary pandemic surveillance practices that operate simultaneously through corporate platform infrastructures, algorithmic data flows, and necropolitical distributions of harm. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that integrates a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2015 and 2023, comparative documentary analysis of the World Health Organisation's interim public-health surveillance guidance and the leading critical sociotechnical case studies of contact-tracing applications, biometric monitoring systems, and digital health passes, and conceptual decomposition of how the Foucauldian inheritance has been mobilised, contested, and extended in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The central finding is that contemporary pandemic surveillance operates through four structurally coupled layers — disciplinary surveillance of the individual body, biopolitical regulation of populations through statisticalepidemiological mechanisms, platform-mediated algorithmic surveillance produced by corporate technology actors, and necropolitical distribution of vulnerability across racialised, classed, and politically marginalised populations — and that no one layer can be analytically grasped in isolation from the others. The empirical pattern documented in the institutional indicators reveals that the surveillance practices instituted during the pandemic have not receded with the passing of the acute health emergency but have become naturalised through the recursive coupling of the four layers. The original contribution of this article is the introduction of the analytical framework of four-layer pandemic surveillance, which clarifies why classical accounts that mobilise only one or two of these layers cannot capture the structural specificity of contemporary biopolitical surveillance. The paper closes with implications for surveillance studies and political theory. Methodological limitations include reliance on aggregate institutional indicators and the English-language concentration of the source literature.

Objavljeno29. decembar 2024.
Stranice4866
AutoriAlin Gomez