This essay examines the “dirty margins” where HIV/AIDS, cancer, and academic life intersect. Drawing on Paula Treichler’s concept of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification,” it traces forty years of living with HIV, including a near-fatal episode of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) in 1994 and over a decade of anal dysplasia—conditions rendered culturally legible through AIDS-era moral panic as much as through oncology. I write as autopathography, treating autobiography not as confession but as method, following Arthur W. Frank’s understanding of pathography as knowledge produced from embodied experience. Although KS did not recur, its long shadow shaped the temporal and affective terrain of survival. Moving from the whispered moralization of illness to the clinic’s production of the clinical self—the version of the body produced in medical records, and from academic domestication and erotic counterpractices to quantification, pharmacological society, and the social mirror, the essay traces how a misbehaving body is repeatedly threatened, written down, fragmented, managed, and measured—yet continues to theorize back. In these processes, minoritized bodies become hypervisible as research objects yet remain marginal as knowledge producers. Against triumphant scripts of biomedical progress, the essay assembles a counterarchive of resentment, erotic improvisation, and delayed care. The “dirty margins” of cancer, it argues, reside not only in diseased cells but also in the epistemic and institutional systems that metabolize marginalized bodies as spectacle, evidence, and compliance while refusing their authority as theory.

Self-immolation has emerged as one of the most powerful forms of political protest in the age of media, capable of moving people across vast distances into collective action. In 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty US Air Force serviceman, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This essay reads Bushnell’s self-immolation as an act of resistance to US governmentality by using the disciplinary choreography of the American soldier against itself. The essay describes how Bushnell stages a disassembling of the American soldier to reveal an entanglement between the reproduction of the American way of life and the production of Palestinian death in Gaza. Further, the essay argues that Bushnell’s act does not simply protest the genocide in Gaza but performs what I call the ungovernable aesthetics of dying: an immanent, embodied critique of an apparatus of governance that normalizes genocide as a means of managing its possible resistance. Gaza, then, becomes a lens through which the structure of American biopolitical governance becomes inescapably legible. When Bushnell burns the soldier’s body, he transforms it into an exothermic process and, in doing so, releases an affective force that moves people across distances, producing a collective refusal of the American way of life.

Published in 2006, Santiago Nazarian’s novel Mastigando humanos: Um romance psicodélico (Chewing Humans: A Psychedelic Novel, 2006) details the misadventures of an alligator named Victório who lives in the city sewers and eventually develops a desire to write an autobiography. Structured from a first-person point of view, he recounts his experiences eating trash while coexisting with other animals, his abduction by university researchers, and his struggles to finish his autobiography. This article analyzes Nazarian’s novel through a picaresque lens and connects the literary character of the picaro with trash animals, or urban-based animals that have adopted trash as part of their diet. It argues that Victório’s life embodies the picaro’s penchant for dissimulation, estrangement, and self-fashioning through the act of writing. More broadly, it claims that Mastigando humanos underscores the picaresque myth’s ecological orientation by portraying trash animals as picaros who devise ingenious strategies of survival within the city.

This article engages health humanities scholarship that approaches biomedical knowledge as cultural and pedagogical, and that treats patient experience, clinician reports, medical images, and other quotidian patient and/or health-provider texts as interpretive sites. This work fleshes out the intelligibility of patient voices as constitutive of a cartography of presence. Drawing on queer theory and the onco-humanities, I argue that clinical cancer settings operate through choreographies that both organize bodies and feature tactical refusals. Autobiographical experience rendered as pathography—often dismissed as anecdotal—is approached here as research evidence and as animating practices of resistance within regimes of biomedical authority. Methodologically, the article juxtaposes close readings of two sets of artifacts: (1) Tactic, the first widely broadcast cancer-focused educational television series (produced by the American Cancer Society and NBC) and (2) a hauntological archive summoned from my 2025 to 2026 Stage IV lung cancer documents; a constellation of clinical and autobiographical traces—fieldnotes, clinical care-provider reports, and medical images. Read together, these materials reveal how cancer—reimagined as an “epidemic of signification”—has long functioned as a pedagogical project aimed at managing uncertainty, disciplining affect, and sustaining optimism as a mode of governance. By placing a contemporary patient-curated archive in dialogue with mid-century public cancer pedagogy, the article traces queer pedagogical practices that rewrite the normative from cancer’s margins. It advances the concept of tactical choreographies to name how cancer patients inhabit, reroute, and on occasion, refuse the pedagogical demands of medicine under conditions of institutional invisibility, necropolitical abjection, and state violence.

This article examines the historical transformation of childhood vaccination in the Netherlands between 1872 and 1959. It analyses how vaccination was reframed from an individual parental responsibility to a collective practice through the establishment of the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ (National Immunisation Programme). I analyse this historical trajectory as a case of ‘public health atomism’, a strategy that achieves collective health by prioritizing individual health outcomes and local action. Rather than relying on top-down state mandates, the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ was a consequence of co-operation between general practitioners, municipal health officials, civil society organisations, and volunteers. Drawing from published medical sources, parliamentary records, and material from local and national archives, this article provides a detailed historical account of how local governance and autonomy shaped vaccination practices, highlighting the role of the ‘entgemeenschap’ (vaccination community) as a key organisational model for situated collaboration. As such, it revisits childhood vaccination as an archetypical example of biopolitical state intervention, demonstrating how localised, flexible co-operation was instrumental in integrating vaccination into Dutch society.

Resilience has become a central concept in academic and political debates about government policy over the last decade or so. In a complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy buzzword of choice, assumed to be the answer to wide-ranging range of policy issues. In his book Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, David Chandler takes on the concept of resilience and the ways in which it is used by policymakers and academics. In their discussion of the book, Julian Reid and Philip Hammond critically engages with some of Chandler’s conclusions while approving of other aspects of the book. They query the relationship between the concept of resilience, the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberalism, and the possibility of critique. The debate about resilience thus sits at the heart of contemporary politics, and the debate links concerns of scholars in a number of sub-disciplines within political science.

This essay coins and develops the concept of Longevity Capitalism, a biopolitical and financial regime in which both the condition of living longer and the pursuit of longevity are transformed into frontiers of accumulation. As financialisation extends into the domain of ageing, longevity – once a social and fiscal challenge – has been reframed as an investment opportunity. The essay traces a shift from collective welfare management to individualized risk-bearing, showing how uncertainty about life expectancy is converted into a new asset class. Drawing on examples such as financial instruments that profit from longevity risk, the rise of ‘age-tech’, and Silicon Valley’s ventures in life extension, it shows how biological time is increasingly treated as an economic resource. It also examines the speculative pursuit of ‘longevity escape velocity’, where technological innovation is imagined to outpace ageing and death itself becomes a technical problem. Together, these developments reveal a system in which longer life functions as a perpetually deferred investment cycle – an economy sustained by its own postponement. The essay argues that economic and biological time, wealth and health, are now fused within a single regime of managed futurity, reflecting new forms of power over who – and how – gets to live longer.

Military robotic swarming is expected to herald a disruptive change in warfare. This article analyses how both the technoscientific promises and problematizations of robotic swarming in the military relate to transformations in the way wars are cognized and conducted by liberal societies. This analysis will be conducted through the lens of a more-than-human biopolitics. Firstly, the paper traces how a new understanding of life, established by complexity sciences, has enabled entanglements and translations between different forms of life and how these have informed the military imaginaries and design principles of military swarming. Secondly, the problematization of robotic swarms as potentially running out of human control is re-interpreted in terms of this re-conceptualizing and appropriation of a more-than-human life. The central argument here is that a biomimetic robotic swarm not only inherits the desired properties of a natural swarm but also its inherent risks. Thirdly, it is analysed how military approaches to the government of robotic swarms and their dangerousness move to a less centralized and less direct form of Command and Control (C2), aiming to maximize the benefits of swarming while minimizing its risks. The article concludes by discussing how this new C2 paradigm of governing at the ‘edge of chaos’ points us to the need to rethink the legal ordering of swarming.

This article examines Bianca Lovado’s human rights complaints as the first trans woman transferred from a men’s to a women’s remand facility in British Columbia, Canada. Despite the initial transfer, upon re-arrest, Ms. Lovado was inconsistently placed in men’s and women’s facilities and was denied gender-affirming care between 2015 and 2019. Drawing on theories of biopolitical and queer/trans necropolitical governance, I conduct a thematic analysis of her five complaints against BC Corrections. The paper investigates how, despite human rights legislation protecting gender identity and expression, cisnormative sex-based correctional logics regulate trans prisoners. Building on Foucault’s institutions of power, I identify how cisnormative techniques of power led Ms. Lovado to face necropolitical violence via incorrect prison placement and denial of gender-affirming care. Analyzing how Ms. Lovado uses the tribunal to combat necropolitical violence, this paper illustrates the consequences of sex as an institution of power governing over gender, despite equal protections in Canadian law.

The past two decades have seen many social, political, and international relations (IR) theorists make extensive use of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics—or how political power interacts with biological life. What has so far passed unnoticed, however, is that Foucault formulated his highly influential theory about how living populations became political objects in the context of an overarching concern with what he termed “the power to kill life itself.” This essay reassesses Foucault’s biopolitics in light of his broader discussion of the potentially existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and gene editing technology. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess Foucault’s famous critiques of both sovereignty and political universalism, while also providing a succinct introduction to his theories of power and the general history of anthropogenic existential threats. The article concludes by raising fundamental questions for political and IR theory concerning what happens when the biological survival of the human species ceases to be a necessary prerequisite for politics and instead becomes a contingent outcome of politics.

Between 1817 and 1831, four German scientists – Karl von Martius, Georg Langsdorff, Ludwig Riedel, and Friedrich Sello – undertook expeditions in Brazil with the goal of collecting natural specimens, particularly focusing on Brazilian cinchona plants. Renowned for their medicinal properties, especially in the treatment of fever diseases, cinchona specimens were extensively utilized by local Brazilian communities. The widespread use of cinchona raises important questions regarding how German scientists acquired knowledge of the therapeutic properties of plants, previously unknown within German pharmacology. This paper argues that the German understanding of Brazil's cinchona trees was situated within an imperialist endeavor that not only appropriated indigenous knowledge but also involved conducting experiments on these plants and their effects on local populations. This hybridization of knowledge about cinchona was characterized by an asymmetrical dominance of German pharmacological experimentation, which sought to enhance organic life and establish utopian, “healthy” German societies, in both German territories and Brazil. Consequently, German chemical experiments with Brazilian cinchona specimens intersected with biopolitical practices, aimed at manipulating both plant and human life through therapeutic interventions.