Dispositif, Biopolitical Governance, and Significance of Genealogical Approach in Navigating Refugees’ Experiences of Camp and Community

Foucault’s distinction between biopolitics and biopower is significant to society, a normative body in terms of seeing biopower as the practical production of the visible and invisible poles of the dispositif through interdependent discursive and institutional practices of administration. This paper fundamentally discusses two theoretical ideas ingrained with the notion of Foucauldian biopolitics---dispositif and genealogy that Foucault brought into account for merging them into modern biopolitical administrative forces. First, it discusses the idea of dispositif as a mechanism of governance and critically examines its connection to biopower and biopolitics. Second, it analyzes the notion of genealogy as a tool to navigate the politics of forced migration and refugees’ local memories, discursive construction, and fragmentation of previously-coherent ideas and practices and the cohering of formerly disparate ones through a lens that does not privilege the present as the destination of the past.