A Folkers
Biographic Data
| ID | 32310 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Folkers |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Folkers |
| SIGNATURE | FOLKERS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goethe University Frankfurt |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6721-3663 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Property, Power, Politics: An Interview with Brenna Bhandar, Wendy Brown, and Robert Nichols
This article comprises an interview with Brenna Bhandar, Wendy Brown, and Robert Nichols by Andreas Folkers and Alain Pottage. It seeks to identify the conjuncture that has prompted the contemporary resurgence of questions of property in social theory. It takes critical work on the ‘colonial lives of property’ (Bhandar), neoliberalism (Brown), and colonial dispossession (Nichols) as a vantage point from which to identify the potentials and challe…
Critical Climate Materialism
This essay introduces the concept of “residual reification” to renew and rethink critical theory in light of the conceptual and political challenges of the climate crisis. Critical theories show how reification engenders a “second nature” of social institutions. “Residual reification” stresses that the remnants of fossil capitalism—carbon emissions—create global heating and thus a catastrophic nature. The critique of residual reification calls fo…
Symbiotic engineering: Insects, microbes, and the space of vector control
This article analyses vector control methods that use microbes to fight diseases, such as dengue, Zika, or West-Nile, by infecting mosquitoes with an endosymbiotic bacterium, Wolbachia . These methods affect mosquitoes’ capacity to transmit viruses to humans, either by suppressing the whole mosquito population, or by neutralizing the pathogen in the insect itself. Drawing on fieldwork, we show how these approaches instantiate a biopolitical strat…
Calculative futures between climate and finance: A tragedy of multiple horizons
This article analyzes the politics of financial climate risks. It focuses on the phenomena of 'stranded assets' and the 'carbon bubble': the problem that a consistent implementation of international climate goals could contribute to a massive devaluation of the assets of fossil capitalism. Finance experts frame this issue as a 'tragedy of the horizon' (Carney) because, they argue, present investment decisions do not properly account for their fut…
Future Theft: Fossil Capitalization, Ecological Dispossession, and Climate Reparations
This article criticizes the way fossil capitalization dispossesses the future. Turning fossil fuel into capital entails the legal enclosure, calculative cheapening, and material extraction/pollution of the future. Fossil investors' 'present values' hinge on the misery of those dispossessed by climate emergencies. Fossil capitalization is premised on 'future theft' understood as a temporally inverted form of 'original accumulation'. The durability…
Low-carbon cows: From microbial metabolism to the symbiotic planet
This article focuses on two projects - one at a large chemical company and the other at a small start-up - to intervene in the relations between cows and ruminal microbes to reduce bovine methane emissions. It describes these interventions as 'symbiotic engineering': a biopolitical technique targeting holobionts and becoming effective by working on interlaced sets of living things. Based on the analysis of these cases, the article elucidates a pl…
Fossil modernity: The materiality of acceleration, slow violence, and ecological futures
This article seeks to materialize social theories of modern temporalities. It proposes a tempo-material analysis of carbon resources like coal, oil, and gas to illuminate how fossil materialities both underpin and undermine modern temporalities and introduce the notion of fossil modernity to evoke an understanding of the modern composed of multiple conflicting modes of material temporality. Fossil resources (fossil fuels and petrochemical substan…
Einleitung: Symbiose als Theoriefigur– Fünf Thesen
Einleitung: Symbiose als Theoriefigur– Fünf Thesen
Symbiosozialität – Zwischen Leben und Gesellschaft
Egal, ob es um die gestörte Beziehung des Menschen zu seinem Mikrobiom, die Auflösung von vitalen Banden in Ökosystemen oder die Beeinträchtigung des planetarischen Stoffwechsels geht – die Gegenwart ist heute durch eine Krise symbiotischer Beziehungen gekennzeichnet, die sowohl sozial induziert als auch für die Gesellschaft folgenschwer ist. Der vorliegende Aufsatz hat das Ziel, die Soziologie konzeptuell auf diese Problemlage einzustellen. Entw…
Air-appropriation: The imperial origins and legacies of the Anthropocene
This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene - the ecological nomos of the earth - and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt's spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos…
Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security
This article analyses stockpiling as a security device that hoards time, stores power and buffers disruptions. The stockpile is a temporal matter of security by virtue of its ability to freeze time and to prepare for future emergencies. Stockpiling is informed by anticipations of threats but also materially underpins expectations. After unpacking the temporal ontology of stockpiling, the article traces its history as a security device and technol…
Logistical resistance against operations of capital: Security and protest in supply chains and finance
Was ist kritisch an Kritischer Infrastruktur? Kriegswichtigkeit, Lebenswichtigkeit, Systemwichtigkeit und die Infrastrukturen der Kritik
Von der Modernisierung zur Ökologisierung. Werden und Biopolitik bei Deleuze/Guattari und Haraway
Der Beitrag entwickelt anhand der Arbeiten von Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari einerseits und Donna Haraway andererseits ein alternatives Konzept des Werdens, das sich vom vorherrschenden soziologischen und biologischen Evolutionsdenken unterscheidet. Werden wird nicht lediglich als Differenzierungs- und Abgrenzungsgeschehen aufgefasst, sondern als Komplizierungs- und Relationierungsprozess unterschiedlicher lebendiger und nicht-lebendiger Wese…
Die Verschränkung von Umwelt und Wohnwelt – Grüne smart homes aus der Perspektive der pluralen Sphärologie
This paper links two strands of Peter Sloterdijk's sphere project – his theory of the environment and his theory of dwelling – and mobilizes them for an analysis of entanglements between spaces of the environment and the space of the home in contemporary sustainability policies and smart home experiments. First, we retrace how Sloterdijk's topology of the environment combines a historical phenomenological methodology with ecological thinking. In …
Politik des Lebens jenseits seiner selbst
SozW Soziale Welt , Seite 365 - 384
Existential provisions: The technopolitics of public infrastructure
The paper provides a technopolitical analysis of public infrastructure by attending to the ways large technical systems became a political problem and how the development of infrastructure has inflected biopower, territoriality and security. It seeks to deepen the historical understanding of technopolitics by exploring the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (existential provision), which served as a crucial framework guiding public infrastructure provisi…
Continuity and catastrophe: Business Continuity Management and the Security of Financial Operations
This paper discusses business continuity management (BCM) and its role in contemporary financial institutions. BCM is a nascent disaster preparedness and recovery strategy that seeks to protect vital business operations from disruptions. The paper traces contemporary BCM back to Cold War continuity of government planning, and shows how BCM came to comprehend security as continuity of processes rather than integrity of goods. BCM is prominent in f…
Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique
This paper draws attention to Foucault's genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault's turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault develope…
Von der Ironie der Normalisierung zur Autoimmunität. Der Subprime Mortgager und die Finanzkrise
Dass jeder Versuch, Risiken zu regulieren selbst riskant ist, hat der Verlauf der jüngsten Finanzkrise erneut auf dramatische Weise vor Augen geführt. Dieser Artikel untersucht die paradoxen Auswirkungen der finanztechnischen Normalisierungstechniken des credit scoring und der mortgage securitization, die einen entscheidenden Anteil an der subprime-Krise und der folgenden Finanzkrise hatten. Die untersuchten Techniken zielten darauf ab, Marktteil…
After virtù and fortuna: Foucault on the government of economic events
The field of governmentality studies extends the analysis of power relations beyond the state, and has thereby widened the understanding of government. However, the dominant conceptualization of governmentality as conduct of conduct and the empirical focus on subjectivating modes of power limit the potential of the governmentality approach. In this paper I want to explore the possibilities of transcending this perspective by redescribing governme…
Fossil modernity: The materiality of acceleration, slow violence, and ecological futures
This article seeks to materialize social theories of modern temporalities. It proposes a tempo-material analysis of carbon resources like coal, oil, and gas to illuminate how fossil materialities both underpin and undermine modern temporalities and introduce the notion of fossil modernity to evoke an understanding of the modern composed of multiple conflicting modes of material temporality. Fossil resources (fossil fuels and petrochemical substan…
Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique
This paper draws attention to Foucault's genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault's turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault develope…
Existential provisions: The technopolitics of public infrastructure
The paper provides a technopolitical analysis of public infrastructure by attending to the ways large technical systems became a political problem and how the development of infrastructure has inflected biopower, territoriality and security. It seeks to deepen the historical understanding of technopolitics by exploring the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (existential provision), which served as a crucial framework guiding public infrastructure provisi…
Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security
This article analyses stockpiling as a security device that hoards time, stores power and buffers disruptions. The stockpile is a temporal matter of security by virtue of its ability to freeze time and to prepare for future emergencies. Stockpiling is informed by anticipations of threats but also materially underpins expectations. After unpacking the temporal ontology of stockpiling, the article traces its history as a security device and technol…
Low-carbon cows: From microbial metabolism to the symbiotic planet
This article focuses on two projects - one at a large chemical company and the other at a small start-up - to intervene in the relations between cows and ruminal microbes to reduce bovine methane emissions. It describes these interventions as 'symbiotic engineering': a biopolitical technique targeting holobionts and becoming effective by working on interlaced sets of living things. Based on the analysis of these cases, the article elucidates a pl…
Air-appropriation: The imperial origins and legacies of the Anthropocene
This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene - the ecological nomos of the earth - and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt's spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos…
Logistical resistance against operations of capital: Security and protest in supply chains and finance
Continuity and catastrophe: Business Continuity Management and the Security of Financial Operations
This paper discusses business continuity management (BCM) and its role in contemporary financial institutions. BCM is a nascent disaster preparedness and recovery strategy that seeks to protect vital business operations from disruptions. The paper traces contemporary BCM back to Cold War continuity of government planning, and shows how BCM came to comprehend security as continuity of processes rather than integrity of goods. BCM is prominent in f…
Calculative futures between climate and finance: A tragedy of multiple horizons
This article analyzes the politics of financial climate risks. It focuses on the phenomena of 'stranded assets' and the 'carbon bubble': the problem that a consistent implementation of international climate goals could contribute to a massive devaluation of the assets of fossil capitalism. Finance experts frame this issue as a 'tragedy of the horizon' (Carney) because, they argue, present investment decisions do not properly account for their fut…
Future Theft: Fossil Capitalization, Ecological Dispossession, and Climate Reparations
This article criticizes the way fossil capitalization dispossesses the future. Turning fossil fuel into capital entails the legal enclosure, calculative cheapening, and material extraction/pollution of the future. Fossil investors' 'present values' hinge on the misery of those dispossessed by climate emergencies. Fossil capitalization is premised on 'future theft' understood as a temporally inverted form of 'original accumulation'. The durability…
Politik des Lebens jenseits seiner selbst
SozW Soziale Welt , Seite 365 - 384
After virtù and fortuna: Foucault on the government of economic events
The field of governmentality studies extends the analysis of power relations beyond the state, and has thereby widened the understanding of government. However, the dominant conceptualization of governmentality as conduct of conduct and the empirical focus on subjectivating modes of power limit the potential of the governmentality approach. In this paper I want to explore the possibilities of transcending this perspective by redescribing governme…
After virtù and fortuna: Foucault on the government of economic events
The field of governmentality studies extends the analysis of power relations beyond the state, and has thereby widened the understanding of government. However, the dominant conceptualization of governmentality as conduct of conduct and the empirical focus on subjectivating modes of power limit the potential of the governmentality approach. In this paper I want to explore the possibilities of transcending this perspective by redescribing governme…
Von der Ironie der Normalisierung zur Autoimmunität. Der Subprime Mortgager und die Finanzkrise
Dass jeder Versuch, Risiken zu regulieren selbst riskant ist, hat der Verlauf der jüngsten Finanzkrise erneut auf dramatische Weise vor Augen geführt. Dieser Artikel untersucht die paradoxen Auswirkungen der finanztechnischen Normalisierungstechniken des credit scoring und der mortgage securitization, die einen entscheidenden Anteil an der subprime-Krise und der folgenden Finanzkrise hatten. Die untersuchten Techniken zielten darauf ab, Marktteil…
Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique
This paper draws attention to Foucault's genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault's turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault develope…
Politik des Lebens jenseits seiner selbst
SozW Soziale Welt , Seite 365 - 384
Existential provisions: The technopolitics of public infrastructure
The paper provides a technopolitical analysis of public infrastructure by attending to the ways large technical systems became a political problem and how the development of infrastructure has inflected biopower, territoriality and security. It seeks to deepen the historical understanding of technopolitics by exploring the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (existential provision), which served as a crucial framework guiding public infrastructure provisi…
Continuity and catastrophe: Business Continuity Management and the Security of Financial Operations
This paper discusses business continuity management (BCM) and its role in contemporary financial institutions. BCM is a nascent disaster preparedness and recovery strategy that seeks to protect vital business operations from disruptions. The paper traces contemporary BCM back to Cold War continuity of government planning, and shows how BCM came to comprehend security as continuity of processes rather than integrity of goods. BCM is prominent in f…
Was ist kritisch an Kritischer Infrastruktur? Kriegswichtigkeit, Lebenswichtigkeit, Systemwichtigkeit und die Infrastrukturen der Kritik
Von der Modernisierung zur Ökologisierung. Werden und Biopolitik bei Deleuze/Guattari und Haraway
Der Beitrag entwickelt anhand der Arbeiten von Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari einerseits und Donna Haraway andererseits ein alternatives Konzept des Werdens, das sich vom vorherrschenden soziologischen und biologischen Evolutionsdenken unterscheidet. Werden wird nicht lediglich als Differenzierungs- und Abgrenzungsgeschehen aufgefasst, sondern als Komplizierungs- und Relationierungsprozess unterschiedlicher lebendiger und nicht-lebendiger Wese…
Die Verschränkung von Umwelt und Wohnwelt – Grüne smart homes aus der Perspektive der pluralen Sphärologie
This paper links two strands of Peter Sloterdijk's sphere project – his theory of the environment and his theory of dwelling – and mobilizes them for an analysis of entanglements between spaces of the environment and the space of the home in contemporary sustainability policies and smart home experiments. First, we retrace how Sloterdijk's topology of the environment combines a historical phenomenological methodology with ecological thinking. In …
Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security
This article analyses stockpiling as a security device that hoards time, stores power and buffers disruptions. The stockpile is a temporal matter of security by virtue of its ability to freeze time and to prepare for future emergencies. Stockpiling is informed by anticipations of threats but also materially underpins expectations. After unpacking the temporal ontology of stockpiling, the article traces its history as a security device and technol…
Logistical resistance against operations of capital: Security and protest in supply chains and finance
Einleitung: Symbiose als Theoriefigur– Fünf Thesen
Einleitung: Symbiose als Theoriefigur– Fünf Thesen
Symbiosozialität – Zwischen Leben und Gesellschaft
Egal, ob es um die gestörte Beziehung des Menschen zu seinem Mikrobiom, die Auflösung von vitalen Banden in Ökosystemen oder die Beeinträchtigung des planetarischen Stoffwechsels geht – die Gegenwart ist heute durch eine Krise symbiotischer Beziehungen gekennzeichnet, die sowohl sozial induziert als auch für die Gesellschaft folgenschwer ist. Der vorliegende Aufsatz hat das Ziel, die Soziologie konzeptuell auf diese Problemlage einzustellen. Entw…
Air-appropriation: The imperial origins and legacies of the Anthropocene
This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene - the ecological nomos of the earth - and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt's spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos…
Fossil modernity: The materiality of acceleration, slow violence, and ecological futures
This article seeks to materialize social theories of modern temporalities. It proposes a tempo-material analysis of carbon resources like coal, oil, and gas to illuminate how fossil materialities both underpin and undermine modern temporalities and introduce the notion of fossil modernity to evoke an understanding of the modern composed of multiple conflicting modes of material temporality. Fossil resources (fossil fuels and petrochemical substan…
Low-carbon cows: From microbial metabolism to the symbiotic planet
This article focuses on two projects - one at a large chemical company and the other at a small start-up - to intervene in the relations between cows and ruminal microbes to reduce bovine methane emissions. It describes these interventions as 'symbiotic engineering': a biopolitical technique targeting holobionts and becoming effective by working on interlaced sets of living things. Based on the analysis of these cases, the article elucidates a pl…
Symbiotic engineering: Insects, microbes, and the space of vector control
This article analyses vector control methods that use microbes to fight diseases, such as dengue, Zika, or West-Nile, by infecting mosquitoes with an endosymbiotic bacterium, Wolbachia . These methods affect mosquitoes’ capacity to transmit viruses to humans, either by suppressing the whole mosquito population, or by neutralizing the pathogen in the insect itself. Drawing on fieldwork, we show how these approaches instantiate a biopolitical strat…
Calculative futures between climate and finance: A tragedy of multiple horizons
This article analyzes the politics of financial climate risks. It focuses on the phenomena of 'stranded assets' and the 'carbon bubble': the problem that a consistent implementation of international climate goals could contribute to a massive devaluation of the assets of fossil capitalism. Finance experts frame this issue as a 'tragedy of the horizon' (Carney) because, they argue, present investment decisions do not properly account for their fut…
Future Theft: Fossil Capitalization, Ecological Dispossession, and Climate Reparations
This article criticizes the way fossil capitalization dispossesses the future. Turning fossil fuel into capital entails the legal enclosure, calculative cheapening, and material extraction/pollution of the future. Fossil investors' 'present values' hinge on the misery of those dispossessed by climate emergencies. Fossil capitalization is premised on 'future theft' understood as a temporally inverted form of 'original accumulation'. The durability…
Property, Power, Politics: An Interview with Brenna Bhandar, Wendy Brown, and Robert Nichols
This article comprises an interview with Brenna Bhandar, Wendy Brown, and Robert Nichols by Andreas Folkers and Alain Pottage. It seeks to identify the conjuncture that has prompted the contemporary resurgence of questions of property in social theory. It takes critical work on the ‘colonial lives of property’ (Bhandar), neoliberalism (Brown), and colonial dispossession (Nichols) as a vantage point from which to identify the potentials and challe…
Critical Climate Materialism
This essay introduces the concept of “residual reification” to renew and rethink critical theory in light of the conceptual and political challenges of the climate crisis. Critical theories show how reification engenders a “second nature” of social institutions. “Residual reification” stresses that the remnants of fossil capitalism—carbon emissions—create global heating and thus a catastrophic nature. The critique of residual reification calls fo…
Political science (14 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Ecology (6 works) · Economic and Social Issues (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Business (4 works)