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This paper examines the intra- and inter-state usage of biometrics as a 'new' technology of development and neoliberal security in South Asia. We view developmental use of biometrics as a tool for integrating the vast majority of poor and marginalized people as visible and calculable economic subjects. We examine the ways in which biometrics translates people into data for the purposes of state, security, and economic legibility. In this paper, we explore biometrics at the intersection of geopolitics, biopolitics, and development to highlight the promise and pitfalls of 'technological progress' as a new development strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1960s, the US federal government deemed poverty to be a national crisis, and actively intervened to solve this problem. My question for this article is how did preschool education become a key site to remedy this crisis? Government interventions were a combination of poverty research, racialized politics, and child development. I show how the discipline of early childhood education cohered around the term 'disadvantaged child', in turn influencing the War on Poverty policies, including the basis of Head Start preschool education. During this same decade proponents of Sesame Street-with private funding, along with extensive testing mechanisms by consultants-argued that the television could reach more children, therefore be more cost effective. This paper investigates how surplus populations became determined and demarcated, as early as three years old. I question how televised preschool taught 'affective skills' and proper social relations during times of political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1892, ten years into the fifth international cholera epidemic that lasted from 1881 to 1896, fear of cholera in North America, particularly in Toronto, was full blown. Cholera had been raging in the Middle East, India, and Europe, and in Russia alone there were an estimated 300,000 deaths, but the disease had yet to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Maritime traffic of immigrants from Europe was continuous, and each migrant ship potentially carried the disease. Doctors, government officials, and politicians were not asking ‘would cholera come?’ but rather, when. In the city of Toronto, no one actually got sick or died from cholera in 1892. However, the crisis and fears of imminent cholera were real. This article documents how future threats became immediate and dire concerns. My task here becomes how to write a history of an event that was shaped by urgency, immediacy, and speculation on the future. My argument will show how the geography of an epidemic is not limited to the presence of disease. How do you theorize a crisis in the absence of an actual disease outbreak? How do you theorize an event that didn’t happen? This article will answer these questions and contribute to recent literature in geography that engages with life, security, and the future. Predictions about both the present and the future were speculative statements, and these statements had effects on cities and nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The meanings of “terrorism” and “anti-terrorism” are socially constructed and highly contested. Timothy Luke’s (2004) term “propaganda of the deed” suggests that terrorism is linked to a war of signs. Each deed can be mobilized for different interests to energize and embed each act with layers of politics and culture as a frame for retaliation. According to Robert W. Williams, “Contemporary terrorism is characterized by the randomness of its attacks against an entire population or society—attacks which could include such possible effects as the mass destruction of targets and the mass disruption of social life” (Williams, 2003, p. 282). While internationally these definitions of what constitutes terrorism will be played out between powerful governments and international courts (Beck, 2002), domestically, the use of the discourses of terrorism has become not only politicized, but also anchored in existing and expanding domestic policies and programmes. Post-9/11, in the USA, a conservative political agenda has fuelled attempts to blur the boundaries between dissent or even crimes of property and what the state defines as acts of terrorism, particularly when these involve progressive movements. Although media accounts often focused on 9/11 as an abrupt departure or turning point, less attention has been paid to the continuities with political divisions and power relations that existed prior to the fall of the Twin Towers. This paper examines how interests across the political spectrum have sought to discursively frame terrorist threats to the city and to redefine what it means to have security in the city. We further explore the contradictions that arise when a conservative state, right-wing and progressive movements seek to re-position themselves domestically within a drastically altered geopolitics. Specifically, we outline the ways in which were repression of progressive movements were normalized by the anti-terrorist frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]