Gretchen Du Plessis
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 202293 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Gretchen Du Plessis |
| PRENOMES | Gretchen |
| SOBRENOME | Du Plessis |
| ASSINATURA | DU PLESSIS G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Tampere University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1292-4342 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 16 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 36 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 16 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2010 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Beyond Climate Security
The spectre of resource scarcity as a cause of war is dominant in discussions about potential links between climate change and armed conflict. Via engagement with Georges Bataille's theory of a general economy of the biosphere, this article conceptualises the relationship between climate change and war by focusing on resource excess as a threat. Positing resource excess and thereby the burning of fossil fuels, rather than resource scarcity and cl…
Niewidoczność, kolory, śnieg. Arktyczna biosemioza a przemoc zmiany klimatycznej
teksty drugie
Extermination and excess
Engaging the thinking of Georges Bataille, this article examines the international politics of poison as a category of death-dealing that defies distinctions between war/not war and weapon/not weapon. Refraining from splitting poison into pesticides and chemical weapons, the article analyses political ecologies and affective economies of poison both historically and today, to illuminate which desires and strategies poison, as a technology of deat…
Destructive plasticity and the microbial geopolitics of childhood malnutrition
Engaging Catherine Malabou's philosophical work on biological plasticity, this article combines microbiological and geopolitical analysis of the deadliest manifestations of childhood malnutrition. At the scale of microbiology, childhood malnutrition is a devastating condition and a mystery to which it seems microbiomes – the ecosystems of microbes in the gut – hold a key. At the scale of geopolitics, childhood malnutrition is a calamity generated…
Rural Women with Disabilities in Zimbabwe
Women with disabilities (WWD) in rural Zimbabwe are unable to enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms. The aim of this study was to capture the experiences of WWD in a rural setting. Inspired by critical feminist disability theory, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 WWD (in particular, women with visual and physical impairments) in Mberengwa. Their stories demonstrate limited access to education, employment, information, land, …
Sustaining empire
Joined to the Hawaiian Islands by ocean currents and winds, Kalama Atoll (named Johnston by the United States) emerges from the sea 825 miles southwest of Honolulu. Over a period of 165 years, in furtherance of the U.S. imperial project, Kalama has been rendered both conservation frontier and island laboratory for an extraordinary amount of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. This article examines U.S. imperial governance at Kalama, an uni…
Politics in the Time of Covid
Invisibility, Colors, Snow
This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn's reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environmen…
Killing Reindeer
To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than ca…
Collective Discussion
As students and scholars of global politics, we have been witnessing, participating in, and feeling the effects of recent global upheavals. These include specific events, such as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, but are better understood through their resulting political effects (e.g., pushing back on migration, hardening national borders, denying climate change, reneging on trade deals, gutting the welfare state, increasing resourc…
When pathogens determine the territory
This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. The concept of microbial borders is relevant to global health and …
War machines par excellence
Accounts of security threats and deadly potentials of biological weapons abound while examples of biological weapons in use are rare. Why has a weapon with such great potentials been used so little? Explanations that hinge on technical capabilities, deterrence or diplomatic disarmament successes are insufficient as answers to this question – something else is going on. This article extends Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a war machine to explai…
Danish Demarcations
This article examines the population of the Danish welfare state as an affluent middle class that demarcates itself in relation to a foreign proletariat within a global, neoliberal division of labor. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical conceptualizations of nationalism, it traces relations between Danish nationalism and the xenophobic blaming of foreigners for structural threats to continued Danish affluence and the welfare state. The arti…
Critiquing Capitalism
Firmly enmeshed in the capitalist mode of production, today’s highly skilled professional knowledge workers struggle with an imperative to realize themselves through their work. This article examines how this imperative for self-realization is also characteristic of contemporary practices of vacation travel, and in doing so points to forms of oppression inherent in capitalism today in relation to a practice that is customarily celebrated as a lit…
Individual Responsibility for Health and HIV Infection
Individual responsibility for health is a popular discourse that extends to prescriptions on how to live ‘positively’ with HIV. This study used in-depth interviews over several months with 10 women at public healthcare clinics in Gauteng to examine their uptake of such prescriptions. The transcripted narratives were analysed using qualitative coding of emergent themes. Foucault's notion of technologies of the self is used to illuminate exemplars …
Coping Versus Grieving in a 'Death-accepting' Society
The aim of this study was to understand how AIDS-bereaved women in Indonesia cope in a society where death is believed to be fated. Data analyses were conducted based on the women's interview transcripts and journal entries. Each of the women experienced at least three traumatic life events. The most challenging experience was learning that they have contracted a disease they regarded as associated with prostitution. Given the short lapse of time…
When pathogens determine the territory
This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. The concept of microbial borders is relevant to global health and …
Politics in the Time of Covid
Invisibility, Colors, Snow
This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn's reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environmen…
Sustaining empire
Joined to the Hawaiian Islands by ocean currents and winds, Kalama Atoll (named Johnston by the United States) emerges from the sea 825 miles southwest of Honolulu. Over a period of 165 years, in furtherance of the U.S. imperial project, Kalama has been rendered both conservation frontier and island laboratory for an extraordinary amount of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. This article examines U.S. imperial governance at Kalama, an uni…
War machines par excellence
Accounts of security threats and deadly potentials of biological weapons abound while examples of biological weapons in use are rare. Why has a weapon with such great potentials been used so little? Explanations that hinge on technical capabilities, deterrence or diplomatic disarmament successes are insufficient as answers to this question – something else is going on. This article extends Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a war machine to explai…
Extermination and excess
Engaging the thinking of Georges Bataille, this article examines the international politics of poison as a category of death-dealing that defies distinctions between war/not war and weapon/not weapon. Refraining from splitting poison into pesticides and chemical weapons, the article analyses political ecologies and affective economies of poison both historically and today, to illuminate which desires and strategies poison, as a technology of deat…
Killing Reindeer
To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than ca…
Coping Versus Grieving in a 'Death-accepting' Society
The aim of this study was to understand how AIDS-bereaved women in Indonesia cope in a society where death is believed to be fated. Data analyses were conducted based on the women's interview transcripts and journal entries. Each of the women experienced at least three traumatic life events. The most challenging experience was learning that they have contracted a disease they regarded as associated with prostitution. Given the short lapse of time…
Coping Versus Grieving in a 'Death-accepting' Society
The aim of this study was to understand how AIDS-bereaved women in Indonesia cope in a society where death is believed to be fated. Data analyses were conducted based on the women's interview transcripts and journal entries. Each of the women experienced at least three traumatic life events. The most challenging experience was learning that they have contracted a disease they regarded as associated with prostitution. Given the short lapse of time…
Individual Responsibility for Health and HIV Infection
Individual responsibility for health is a popular discourse that extends to prescriptions on how to live ‘positively’ with HIV. This study used in-depth interviews over several months with 10 women at public healthcare clinics in Gauteng to examine their uptake of such prescriptions. The transcripted narratives were analysed using qualitative coding of emergent themes. Foucault's notion of technologies of the self is used to illuminate exemplars …
Critiquing Capitalism
Firmly enmeshed in the capitalist mode of production, today’s highly skilled professional knowledge workers struggle with an imperative to realize themselves through their work. This article examines how this imperative for self-realization is also characteristic of contemporary practices of vacation travel, and in doing so points to forms of oppression inherent in capitalism today in relation to a practice that is customarily celebrated as a lit…
Danish Demarcations
This article examines the population of the Danish welfare state as an affluent middle class that demarcates itself in relation to a foreign proletariat within a global, neoliberal division of labor. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical conceptualizations of nationalism, it traces relations between Danish nationalism and the xenophobic blaming of foreigners for structural threats to continued Danish affluence and the welfare state. The arti…
War machines par excellence
Accounts of security threats and deadly potentials of biological weapons abound while examples of biological weapons in use are rare. Why has a weapon with such great potentials been used so little? Explanations that hinge on technical capabilities, deterrence or diplomatic disarmament successes are insufficient as answers to this question – something else is going on. This article extends Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a war machine to explai…
Collective Discussion
As students and scholars of global politics, we have been witnessing, participating in, and feeling the effects of recent global upheavals. These include specific events, such as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, but are better understood through their resulting political effects (e.g., pushing back on migration, hardening national borders, denying climate change, reneging on trade deals, gutting the welfare state, increasing resourc…
When pathogens determine the territory
This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. The concept of microbial borders is relevant to global health and …
Killing Reindeer
To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than ca…
Politics in the Time of Covid
Invisibility, Colors, Snow
This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn's reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environmen…
Rural Women with Disabilities in Zimbabwe
Women with disabilities (WWD) in rural Zimbabwe are unable to enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms. The aim of this study was to capture the experiences of WWD in a rural setting. Inspired by critical feminist disability theory, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 WWD (in particular, women with visual and physical impairments) in Mberengwa. Their stories demonstrate limited access to education, employment, information, land, …
Sustaining empire
Joined to the Hawaiian Islands by ocean currents and winds, Kalama Atoll (named Johnston by the United States) emerges from the sea 825 miles southwest of Honolulu. Over a period of 165 years, in furtherance of the U.S. imperial project, Kalama has been rendered both conservation frontier and island laboratory for an extraordinary amount of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. This article examines U.S. imperial governance at Kalama, an uni…
Destructive plasticity and the microbial geopolitics of childhood malnutrition
Engaging Catherine Malabou's philosophical work on biological plasticity, this article combines microbiological and geopolitical analysis of the deadliest manifestations of childhood malnutrition. At the scale of microbiology, childhood malnutrition is a devastating condition and a mystery to which it seems microbiomes – the ecosystems of microbes in the gut – hold a key. At the scale of geopolitics, childhood malnutrition is a calamity generated…
Niewidoczność, kolory, śnieg. Arktyczna biosemioza a przemoc zmiany klimatycznej
teksty drugie
Extermination and excess
Engaging the thinking of Georges Bataille, this article examines the international politics of poison as a category of death-dealing that defies distinctions between war/not war and weapon/not weapon. Refraining from splitting poison into pesticides and chemical weapons, the article analyses political ecologies and affective economies of poison both historically and today, to illuminate which desires and strategies poison, as a technology of deat…
Beyond Climate Security
The spectre of resource scarcity as a cause of war is dominant in discussions about potential links between climate change and armed conflict. Via engagement with Georges Bataille's theory of a general economy of the biosphere, this article conceptualises the relationship between climate change and war by focusing on resource excess as a threat. Positing resource excess and thereby the burning of fossil fuels, rather than resource scarcity and cl…
Sociology (12 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras) · Law (6 obras) · Politics (6 obras) · Philosophy (5 obras) · Environmental ethics (4 obras) · Medicine (4 obras) · Social science (4 obras)