Assemblage Thinking and Participatory Development: Potentiality, Ethics, Biopolitics

摘要: The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates empowers marginalized people, critics it enacts new forms control regulation. This paper reads these debates through analytical lens offered by assemblage thinking. Assemblage allows us to foreground affective relations between people things, diagrams power, or ideal sets force relations, attempt direct relations. On this basis, we characterize different approaches in terms their relation constitutive power relations: modernist will truth attempts objectify categories such as social capital vulnerability; performative recognizes activities, while still entangled may develop ways might challenge existing designs project organizer. characterization helps identify life enacted activities: on one hand, negative biopolitics problematizes power; other, an affirmative creates possibilities for individual collective life. thinking can thus reconfigure around positions researcher resource among others use struggles against insecurity suffering.