Risky Milieus - Emerging Biopolitical Economies of Circulation
Canadian Journal of Communication – Special Issue
Guest Editors:
Kenneth C. Werbin, Wilfrid Laurier University, kwerbin@wlu.ca
Penelope Ironstone, Wilfrid Laurier University, pironstone@wlu.ca
We live in an era in which life itself has become the primary object of governance – measured, visualized, predicted, and optimized through data, media, and communication infrastructures. From algorithmic risk analysis and biometric surveillance to public health dashboards, climate metrics, and platform governance, contemporary power increasingly operates through data that shapes how populations are known, managed, responsibilized, governed, and policed. This call for papers invites scholars to revisit, reinvigorate, and extend Michel Foucault’s (2007) theoretical framework of governmentality into how today’s data-driven political economies are entangled with the governance and securing of the circulation of people, resources, and things amid overlapping crises of health, inequality, climate, technological transformation, and geopolitics.
As Foucault (2007) so presciently outlined, modern forms of biopower manage populations through a variety of established and emerging security mechanisms that enable, shape, and secure circulation, optimizing and regulating the movement of people (migration, labour mobility, urban flows), resources (capital, food, goods, services), and things (commodities, information, pathogens, pollutants). Emerging technologies, particularly infrastructures of data, serve as both extensions and intensifications of governmentality, targeting extraterritorial spaces in which “...there are ‘zones of higher’ and ‘zones of lower risk’ and apparatuses of security concern themselves with the thresholds for identifying ‘what is dangerous’ within such milieus of circulation” (ibid, p.61). These ‘risky milieus’, or what Werbin and Shade (2025) have termed ‘biopolitical economies of circulation’, crystallize how “...governmentality and power, in our time, are tightly woven with the materiality of data and how it is stitched with bodies, resources and things in motion. Under these conditions, we must ask and continually assess: Who has access to the population’s data? How are the population’s data used to calculate and secure circulation, mitigate risk, and prevent and police disorder?” (p.766).
Recent work has deepened critical engagements with how power over life, death, and data operate in late-capitalist, algorithmic societies. These interventions in data biopolitics and governmentality include theorizations of infopower and the informational person (Koopman, 2019), analysis of algorithmic governance and biopolitical control (Gamez, 2022), thinking about digital enclosures, surveillance capitalism, and the granular biopolitics of securitization (Andrejevic et al, 2024), “practices of interfacing” human and non-human entities (Lipp and Maasen, 2022), “racializing assemblages” (Wehileye, 2014), the biopolitics of settler colonialism (Morgensen, 2011) and gender (Repo, 2016), settler data regimes (TallBear, 2013), Indigenous and other data sovereignties (Rainie et al, 2019; Kukutai and Taylor, 2016; Humel et al, 2021; Walter et al, 2021), “trans data epistemologies” (Stevens and Doğan, 2025), and “queer necropolitics” and homonationalism (Puar, 2017).
This call for papers asks researchers to take up and extend discussions of the interrelations between biopolitical economies of circulation, governmentality, and data to address our current techno-political reality, addressing questions such as:
How are data used to calculate and secure circulation, mitigate risk, prevent and police perceived threats, and with what consequences?
How do apparatuses of security engage with surveillance and algorithmic capitalism to shape and exploit juridical, social, political, cultural, biological, environmental, and affective economies?
What technologies leverage the flow of data to secure bodies, resources, and things and how do they shape the milieus in which they are articulated?
We encourage submissions from scholars investigating emerging biopolitical milieus in areas such as (but not limited to):
Surveillance, management, and apparatuses of control
Environmental and epidemiological risk
Markets, economics, and commodification
Labour and workplace milieus
Migration, immigration, customs, and borders
Mobility, transport, and postal milieus
Platforms and cultural circulation
Data sovereignties
Subjectification, data, and oppression, including overlapping and interdependent systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability
Other relevant areas
Proposals of 400- to 600-words should be submitted by 30 June 2026. Please include a title, abstract, preliminary list of relevant references, and a short bio (50 words) for author(s). Authors will be contacted by approximately 15 July 2026. The deadline for full papers (maximum 8000 words in length including references) is 16 November 2026. Acceptance of the proposal does not guarantee publication of the paper. Anticipated Special Issue publication March 2028.
Comments, queries, and submissions should be sent to the guest editors at the following email addresses:
Kenneth C. Werbin kwerbin@wlu.ca
Penelope Ironstone pironstone.ca
References
Andrejevic, M., O’Neill, C., Smith, G., Selwyn, N., & Gu, X. (2024). Granular biopolitics: Facial recognition, pandemics and the securitization of circulation. New Media & Society, 26(3), 1204-1226. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231201638 (Original work published 2024)
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Gamez, P. (2023). Inhuman Hermeneutics of the Self: Biopolitics in the Age of Big Data. Foucault Studies, 34(1), 80–110. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i34.6939
Hummel, Patrik, et al. "Data sovereignty: A review." Big Data & Society 8.1 (2021): 2053951720982012.
Koopman, C. (2019). How we became our data : a genealogy of the informational person. University of Chicago Press.
Kukutai, Tahu, and John Taylor, eds. Indigenous data sovereignty: Toward an agenda. Vol. 38. ANU press, 2016.
Lipp, B., & Maasen, S. (2022). Techno-bio-politics. On Interfacing Life with and Through Technology. Nanoethics, 16(1), 133–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-022-00413-2
Morgensen, S. L. (2011). The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now. Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), 52–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648801
Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press.
Rainie, S.C., et al. (2019). Indigenous data sovereignty. The state of open data: histories and horizons (F. Perini, Mor. Rubinstein, S. B. Walker, & T. Davies, Eds.; 1st ed.). Project Muse, 300-319.
Stevens, N., & Doğan, A. L. (2025). Trans data epistemologies: Transgender ways of knowing with data. Big Data & Society, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251381694
Swiffen, A. (2025). From European Roots to Settler Soil: Adapting Foucault’s Biopolitics to Canadian Settler Colonialism. Social & Legal Studies, 34(5), 735-752.
TallBear, K. (2013). Native American DNA : tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. University of Minnesota Press.
Walter, M., Lovett, R., Maher, B., Williamson, B., Prehn, J., Bodkin‐Andrews, G., & Lee, V. (2021). Indigenous data sovereignty in the era of big data and open data. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 56(2), 143-156.
Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas viscus : racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Duke University Press.