Research project
Contagious Territories
In this project we think about the relationship between territory and contagion. Tracing the historical, political, and conceptual linkages between territorial bordering and migration on the one hand and disease related phenomena like contagion, immunity, and inoculation on the other, we ask how the biopolitical threat of contagion structures our understanding of territory, and how territorial thinking produces anxieties around contagion and disease.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2030
- Contact
- Ilios Willemars
- Funding
- Startersbeurs
Contagious Territories
Contagion, immunity, or inoculation are often understood in their biomedical inflection. Recent years have seen an increase in theoretical, literary, and artistic work around issues of disease and vaccination. This project investigates how a logic of inoculation operates not only in relation to the body, but proliferates outwards functioning as an ordering principle around which ideas of territoriality and borders take shape. The project is interested, at the same time, in the way that current understandings of the border and of territory give rise to racist and xenophobic notions of the migrant as parasite spreading throughout the body politic and illicitly using and abusing that body, thus threatening its safety and compromising its immunity.
Within the project Contagious Territories we are concerned with the how this paradigm of inoculation and immunity is rooted in an understanding of territorial policing that relies on risk management, insurance, and the collection of ever more data and information used to monitor movement and circulation, to delimit space, and to preemptively render the future manageable.
Contagious Digitalities
This subproject explores the intersection of the aforementioned themes with information, data, and the digital. It seeks to articulate a politics of digital inoculation – a mode of governance supported not only by technological infrastructures designed to calculate, predict and manage risk, but also by the temporal logics embedded within these systems.
Building on a growing body of theoretical, literary, and artistic work that engages with the language of immunity and contagion, the project expands these biomedical metaphors into the domain of the digital. This project investigates how inoculation operates not only in relation to the body, however, but proliferates outwards to the internet, the digital, and the operation of networks and protocols as diagrams of power. By mapping how inoculation operates metaphorically and materially in the realm of the digital, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how risk is managed, embodied as well as aestheticised in contemporary technopolitical regimes.
As part of this project we host an informal reading group where we discuss texts connected to the theme of the project broadly understood. We get together roughly every other week to discuss theoretical as well as literary texts, our own writing as well as that of authors like Angela Mitropoulos, Anna Munster, Matteo Paquinelli, Ramon Amaro, and Lisa Blackman. If you would like to join one of our reading group sessions, please reach out to i.f.d.m.r.willemars@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Forthcoming
Forthcoming. Project conference will take place in June 2026.
Houwen, Janna. “Crossing Borders.” Film programme, Mohammed V University, Rabat, April 2025.
Houwen, Janna. “Emergency, Emergence, and the Essay Film: Amel Alzakout’s Purple Sea and Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe as Interfaces of the Border.” Conference paper, Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, November 2024.
Houwen, Janna. “Video Against the Machine: Lens-Based Interventions in the Refugee Crisis.” Taking Positions on the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Critical Responses in Art and Literature. Special Issue of FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur no. 66, 2019, pp. 72-86. https://www.fkw-journal.de/index.php/fkw/article/download/1476/1486
Willemars, Ilios. “hospitality@thecourt: Kristin Lucas’ Refresh and the techno-poetics of online hosting.” Guest lecture, University of Amsterdam. Amsterdam, May 2025.
Willemars, Ilios. “Data That Should Not Have Been Given: Noise and Immunity in James Newitt’s HAVEN.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, Jan. 2024. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2022-0202.
Willemars, Ilios, and Niall Martin. “Modernity’s Irreplaceability: Data, Derivatives, and the Fungibility of the Flesh.” The Replaceability Paradigm, edited by Niall Martin and Ilios Willemars, De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 227–44. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111286402-013.
Willemars, Ilios. “HIV if only: archival prescriptions and the temporality of the body.” Conference Paper, Memory Studies Association Conference: Communities of Change, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, July 2023. URL: https://msa2023newcastle.dryfta.com/program-schedule
Willemars, Ilios. “Politics of the Visual 2023: Contagious Territories, Viral Figurations at the Border.” Course taught as visiting professor, Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Lisbon, October-November 2023.