N.F. (Nicolas) Gäckle, Dr

My current research focuses on how International Relations theory responds to the Anthropocene, the governance of the affective correlates of the climate crisis, as well as the contemporary constellation of critique, negativity, and the limits of relationality. The research group 'Critique and Crisis in Planetary Times' at the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) that I co-facilitate pursues an interdisciplinary conversation around related questions.

My dissertation 'Experiential biopolitics: Pandemic essays on the life of experience' outlines a conceptualisation of experiential biopolitics and empirically grounds it in an observation of a transversal governmental concern for experiences of living-through the Covid-19 pandemic. The problematisations of pandemic fatigue, pandemic hopelessness, and pandemic dreaming form its empirical focal points. The dissertation argues that experiential biopolitics marks a variation of a traditional biopolitics of the population. Enabled through a recalibration of the biopolitical imaginary of life that acknowledges life’s capacity to nurture experience, experiential biopolitics is conceptualised as a mode of governance that reflexively observes experiences of governance to gauge the limits of its own functioning. The project was funded by the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG) and supervised by Prof. Dr. Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Dr. Filipe dos Reis.