Archive | Vol. 13/2020 | No. 2

Folkers, Andreas; Langenohl, Andreas [Publishing editor]

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Content

Review

[Rezension von:] Florian Sprenger: Epistemologien des Umgebens : Epistemologien des Umgebens : zur Geschichte, Ökologie und Biopolitik künstlicher environments / Bogner, Ole [Autor:in] – 2020

Bogner, Ole

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Pages:

Editorial

Editorial: Was ist sorgende Sicherheit? / Folkers, Andreas [Autor:in] … – 2020

Folkers, Andreas; Langenohl, Andreas

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Pages: 1-15

Scientific article

Caring security: agenealogy of care regimes from antiquity to the anthropocene

Folkers, Andreas

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Pages: 16-39

Scientific article

Ambivalences of global health securitya and the problem of response-ability

Mezes, Carolin

Abstract:

Through qualitative analysis of materials from ethnographic observations and governance documents, and along an analytic framework of infrastructure, this paper examines the ambivalences of care in and of Global Health Security. Global Health Security’s occupation with preparing health systems for an appropriate emergency response is accompanied by the problem of allocating responsibility for this preparedness capacity buildup. The paper argues that a universalist narrative of globally shared vulnerability to infectious disease threats drives Global Health Security as a global governance programme. It is shown how this narrative securitizes existing vulnerabilities in health infrastructures and how Global Health Security thereby functions as a reflexivization of former infrastructural adjustment programmes, which co-constituted these vulnerabilites in the first place. Against the backdrop of the problematic emergency response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the concept of response-ability – developed in neo-materialist and posthumanist feminism – helps to contour the ambivalences of Global Health Security’s care. While certain infrastructural vulnerabilities and provisional needs are being addressed, the caring security employed in Global Health fails to respond to other, obvious infrastructural vulnerabilities.

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Pages: 40-60

Scientific article

"All care is care for the enclosure" : co-imunity, vertical farming and the technopolitics of closed Environments

Wolff, Leon

Abstract:

This article investigates the techno-politics of vertical farming in the field of food security. Drawing on the works of Peter Sloterdijk, the article un-derstands the Vertical Farm as a technology of ecological care that aims to contain the environmental side effects of agriculture while further increas-ing food production. Instead of growing food outdoor in the field, tech-nologies such as hydroponics or LED lighting are being used to create artificial ecosystems in closed environments and integrate them into the urban spaces. The paper argues that the logic of ecological care enshrined in the Vertical Farm follows a logic of co-immunization by drawing a strong boundary between crop production spaces and the environment, thus preventing uncontrolled material flows between them.

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Pages: 61-80

Scientific article

Precaution, insurance, financialization

Langenohl, Andreas

Abstract:

This article deals with recent insurance products aimed at people who wish to make provisions for themselves or others in the event of death or, more generally, to ensure the prosperity of future generations. These products are interpreted as a particular form of the financialization of households and intimate relationships. However, while the bulk of re-search into this phenomenon has emphasized the aspect of the penetration of such relationships by financial logics, the article approaches these products as examples of the constitution of financial products based on moral considerations in the field of intimate (especially: intergenerational) provision and care. Thus, morality and moral communication in intimate relationships appear as a condition for the constitution of financial ration-alities, logic, and flows. Conversely, the purchase of financialized insur-ance products can be reconstructed as reinforcing moralized forms of communication, because the sheer possibility of making financial provi-sion by means of a definitive conclusion of a contract makes scenarios of social finality – from unresponsiveness to death – the subject of negoti-ations between related parties. Thus it is the constitution of financial logics in terms of morality that gives financial capitalism, by way of providing se-curity, a significant impulse of legitimacy.

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Pages: 81-98

Scientific article

Radical care and the future of the welfare state : contours of a paradoxical politics of care

Laufenberg, Mike

Abstract:

In the face of a global crisis of social reproduction, welfare states have con‐sistently failed to produce social security for the majority of the world’s population. In this context, collective and grassroots practices of radical care have gained meaning as non-state strategies for enduring an unequal and insecure world. Through the lens of welfare state theory, this paper ex‐plores both the emancipatory potentials as well as the structural limits and pitfalls of radical care. Its focus lies in contemporary socio-material articu‐lations of communities of care/‘care-citizenship’ and their paradoxical rela‐tions with the welfare state. This paper seeks to avoid the reductivedichotomy of communities of care vs. the state that it identifies in the ap‐proach taken by many protagonists as well as critics of radical care. To this end, it conceptualizes a paradoxical politics of care-citizenship that is not radically opposed tobut rather is engaged in a strategic tension withstate institutions, a means of contributing to a democratic and solidary renewal of the welfare state from below

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Pages: 99-120