New Alumnus Published Article
Samuel Cao '25 (English, History, Religious Studies) is currently attending SCU School of Law. He recently published his research article, "'The Place of Happiness for the Unclean': Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and the Architecture of Control in Culion" in the Winter 2026 edition of SYNTHESIS, a Harvard History of Science journal. Samuel interrogates the U.S. colonial governance of the Culion Leprosy Colony in the Philippines through the frameworks of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Moving beyond conventional narratives of medical benevolence, he reveals how leprosy management became a vehicle for racial classification, spatial segregation, and moral discipline. Culion functioned not simply as a site of care but as a carceral laboratory where imperial power refined techniques for administering life and orchestrating death. Drawing on archival accounts, architectural plans, and colonial legislation, Samuel reinterprets public health as a political technology of empire. By historicizing the operations of surveillance, discipline, and abandonment, he offers new insights into how science and medicine became embedded in projects of colonial domination—and how those logics continue to reverberate in global health governance.