FRIAS Roundtable Discussion - Discovering Socialist Biopolitics

 Discovering Socialist Biopolitics

This roundtable discusses the specificity of twentieth-century biopolitics in Eastern Europe, research approaches and themes that identify the long-term implications of socialist biopolitics as a phenomenon of alternative modernity. It will bring together leading specialists in the history of medicine and the environment, technology, and the social and political history of Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Since Michel Foucault, biopolitics have usually been defined as the administration of (human) lives and populations. They are a product of modernity and range from custodial sentences and the regulation of housing to birth control and eugenics. In a nutshell, biopolitics describes the right and the power of modern states “to make live and to let die”. The state exercises this right on bodies, both collective and individual. Bodies are turned into resources; they are monitored and homogenized with the combined help of scientists and the skills of modern bureaucrats; people are sent to war or deported. Historians have identified three biopolitical regimes in the twentieth century – а (neo)liberal, а fascist, and а socialist – and have connected them with three types of modernity. Despite the key importance of medical biopolitics for understanding modernity and totalitarian societies, it has not yet been studied systematically for East European history.

Moderator:

Prof. Dr. Dietmar Neutatz, Chair of New and Eastern European History, University of Freiburg

Participants:

• Prof. Dr. Melanie Arndt, Chair of Science, Social and Environmental History, University of Freiburg  

The warmth of socialism. Bio-politics and heat supply in the Soviet city

• Dr. Bogdan Cristian Iacob, "Nicolae Iorga" Institute of History, Romanian Academy, Buсharest

Transfer of socialist medical biopolitics

• Prof. Dr. Mie Nakachi, Chair of Global Studies, Hokusei Gakuen University, Japan/ École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris

The Role of the Soviet Medical Profession in Shaping Biopolitics after World War II

• Prof. Dr. Andreas Renner, Chair of the Russian-Asian Studies, LMU, Munich

To Make Men stronger than Nature. Polar medicine in the Soviet Union

• Prof. Dr. Elena Vishlenkova, External Senior Fellow at FRIAS

Soviet Biopolitics and Health Care