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Black death on a loop online through the click economy brings to bear the mimetic violence associated with Blackness. The idea of consuming Black death as a repeat event highlights the visceral economy of online consumption practices in which Black death is shared and passed on as viral content. The foreshadowing of the Black body and Black death is both banalized and commodified as content for instant gratification spread via algorithms, tagging, likes and newsfeeds. The distributive popular economy online and the offering of Black death through a click economy redrafts Blackness through its historic fungibility of slavery and White oppression, and equally ‘virtuality’ in which both its hyper-visibility and invisibility assemble it through new modalities of violence whilst invoking new spaces to commune, grieve and experience collective grief for these demised bodies. Blackness is made perceptible through its liminality and denial of its corporeality such that both social death and mortal death are ascribed to it. This chapter agitates against the futility of Black death by its quest to read Black humanism online as a moment of empowerment and emancipation to reclaim Blackness and to defy its formlessness in the digital economy as the new graveyard of its spiritual resurrection.

The concept of institution has been used by scholars from across a number of disciplines to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, the philosophical roots of this concept have not been well examined, nor have implications for contemporary institutional analysis been fully appreciated. Returning to the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty reveals a depth of thinking that has otherwise been overlooked by institutional theorists. In particular, the author’s analysis reveals two critical insights. First, whereas organizational scholars have closely linked the concepts of institution and taken-for-grantedness, these two concepts were originally understood to be phenomenologically distinct. Second, a detailed examination of Merleau-Ponty’s later work poses the concept of flesh – the twining of the visible and the invisible – as the basis for the interplay of institutions. In turn, the idea of flesh as the foundation of institution invites a more radical reimagining of the growing bifurcation between microfoundations and macrofoundations.

This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of birthing and body politics in the United States and Uganda with the placenta as the catalyst for understanding reproductive regulation and gendered bodily epistemologies. Based on fieldwork spanning 2009–2017 with rural, traditional midwives in Southern Uganda, merged with recent, anecdotal observations from Los Angeles County and greater California and the United States generally, this work considers cultural terrains of placentas as well as corresponding worldviews and perspectives, ranging from life-generating organ imbued with vast spiritual and physiological significance, to preventative mental health food, to bio-waste that is incinerated or filled with toxic chemicals. The bio-ontologies of placentas are explored herein in terms of toxic contingencies and with regard to the relationship between health and industry.

Toxic entanglements and embodied politics of risk and exposure explored herein point to dehumanizing and ill-fitting regulations that stifle health autonomy and medical sovereignty. Such disempowering governance is compounded by gender and myriad cultural factors. With implications for national and international policies, this work examines my findings that illustrate ways in which flesh, technologies and knowledge intersect in bio-praxes that monitor and manage, rather than support, the reproductive body. This work suggests departure from colonial instability and dispossession by re-scripting medicine in such a way that achieves health justice through bodily knowledge, or enfleshed understandings. Decolonizing the flesh demands ungripping health encounters from praxes of control, in favour of choice and preference. This entails reclaiming physiologies as well as reimagining how medical systems inform core ethos.

How do we write from the sensory body in ways that can convey the lived experience of the researcher and the researched, which can allow other researchers to make sense of their lived experience as well? What alternative writings could transform disembodied academia through dialogue and relational reflection? The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the value of the researcher’s embodied reflexivity in academic writing. More specifically, this chapter explores the ways in which we can write differently about organisational phenomena by experiencing aesthetic moments in the field. To accomplish this, I share examples of the aesthetic moments that I, as a researcher, experienced while undertaking three ethnographic projects: a study on professional dance, a study on academic motherhood and a study on female-canine companionship. This chapter identifies three aspects that allow the researcher to experience aesthetic moments – namely, appreciating sensory cues, writing ‘in and from the flesh’ and allowing vulnerability to flourish. Paying attention to the social micro-dynamics that exist between researchers and research phenomena and addressing the analytically marginalised experiences of researchers, therefore, allows for developing academic writing practices in more reflexive and sensory-appreciative directions.

This chapter explores the interaction between different kinds of knowledge and representations in the making of the ‘fleshed’ female reproductive body in an Indian city. In particular, it analyzes how women perceive contraception and how the reproductive governance helped to produce the female sterilization as the most widely used contraceptive method in India. The study is based on the case of the city of Bhuj, in the state of Gujarat (India), where three anthropological fieldworks (15 months) were conducted. Modern contraceptive methods are based on a biomedical representation of the body, drawn from Western categories of knowledge and experience, whereas women live the ‘fleshed’ reproductive body through local categories of substance and fluids. How is this knowledge mobilized and affected in relation to reproductive technologies and the government of reproduction? This question is addressed through the analysis of women's embodied experiences of contraception. The narratives collected show a resistance to biomedicine, considered to be a model that alters the female body and its reproductive capacity. Nevertheless, even when sterilization was considered to be a deliberate act of tampering with the functioning of their bodies, women displayed a pragmatic agency in choosing this method. The experiences of respondents reflected complex negotiations between bodily suffering, socio-economic structures and the microphysics of power surrounding them, rather than a unilateral submission to medical authority and reproductive governance.

This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.