With the term biopolitics, based on Foucault’s development of the concept,  we intend to indicate  a direct and immediate connection between politics and life, the latter understood in its biological sense.

The aspects that will be examined are the relationship between institutional, regulatory and political choices and the bioethical issues originating from the freedom of scientific research and technological progress.

In particular, what  needs to be investigated is the way in which issues such as justice, solidarity, ethical principles, relativism, the idea what it is to be “human” are dealt with within the political and cultural debate. The way in which  political and legislative choices relate to the ethical and cultural pluralism of modernity will also be addressed.   The interdisciplinary approach of bioethics in general and, consequently, also of biopolitics, makes this field of study and research particularly suited as an area of enquiry for a group of scholars who specialise  in those  disciplines  typically comprising the field of Political Sciences.

2014-15 Seminars

Biopolitcs and biopower: to be born, to live and be treated in today’s Italy

  • Biopolitics: the origin of a concept (Vincenzo Sorrentino)
  • Assisted reproduction in Italy: history and perspectives on problematic regulations (Alessandra Bellelli, Alessia Valongo, Federica Mannella, Giorgio Repetto)
  • Forms of biopower in contemporary society: from the protection of collective interests to the controversial restrictions of freedom (Roberto Segatori)
  • People and health/social services: organizational principles and individual misadventures (Marcello Catanelli, Alessandra Pioggia)
  • Science and politics of “good births”: the history of  eugenics in the Twentieth Century (Claudia Mantovani)
  • Biolaw and animal  rights (Alessandra Valastro and Luigi Lombardi Vallauri)

Group Members:
Alessandra Bellelli, Fiorella Giacalone, Stefano Giubboni, Federica Mannella, Claudia Mantovani, Alessandra Pioggia, Ambrogio Santambrogio, Roberto Segatori, Vincenzo Sorrentino, Alessia Valongo, Alessandra Valastro