Sarah Sze, "Day", 2003. Offset lithograph and silkscreen. Copyright: Sarah Sze. Image credit: Sarah Sze Studio

Contagious Territories

2024-2030

Funded by the Startersbeurs
(Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society)


Conference Reading group Film screenings Contact

About

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.


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.

Members

Dr. Ilios Willemars

is Assistant Professor in Cultural Analysis and Literary Studies at Leiden University. Ilios works on placeholders, replacement, contagion, insurance, immunity, infrastructure, digitalization, the work of Franz Kafka, and animals that commit suicide.

Dr. Janna Houwen

is Assistant Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and a Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute in Morocco, Rabat. In recent projects, Janna explores the workings of stasis in processes of displacement, the machinic operation of borders, and interrelated questions of territoriality, immunity, and contagion. 

Dr. Dong Xia

is a postdoctoral researcher in New Media and Digital Culture at Leiden University. They have backgrounds in literary studies and cultural studies. They currently work on a project researching 'the chronic' as a descriptor of temporal experience in the digital age.

Eline Balster

is a research master's student Arts, Literature & Media at Leiden University. In recent times, Eline has been reading about death, thinking about water & working on this website.

Work

Publications

Teaching

Other


Project publications

forthcoming

Events

Conference
17-19 June 2026, Leiden University.
Link to: Conference page

Reading group
Biweekly reading group taking place at Leiden University.
Link to: Reading group page

Film screenings
Monthly film screenings taking place at De Besturing, The Hague.
Link to: Film screenings page


Upcoming events

2 December 2025: Reading group
Session 4: Creep
Arsenaal, Leiden University

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