Critical Posthumanism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Internationally there has been some interest in how critical pedagogies might be enabled in higher education to support transformative social agendas. Few writers, however, have theorised the ethico-political aspects of this effort from a feminist new materialist perspective. By focusing on the analysis of an inter-institutional collaborative course which was constructed across three disciplines and two differently positioned universities in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper examines the design of the course retrospectively from a feminist new materialist theoretical framing. In so doing, it moves beyond more traditional understandings of critical pedagogy to consider the design and student engagement with the course from the perspective of what we call " response-able pedagogies. " Response-able pedagogies are not simply examples of the type of learning that can take place when power relations, materiality and entanglement are acknowledged; they also constitute ethico-political practices that incorporate a relational ontology into teaching and learning activities. We propose that ethico-political practices such as attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity, and rendering each other capable, constitute reponse-able pedagogies. The paper focuses on the transdisciplinary and interinstitutional course to consider how these ethico-political practices which constitute a response-able pedagogy might (be put to) work and how the students were both enabled and constrained by this design in terms of their responses to such ethico-political practices.

- by and +1
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- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Higher Education, Posthumanism, Critical Pedagogy

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

- by Siobhan Watters
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- Future Studies, Anthropology, Media Studies, Cyborg Theory

What Lies Beyond the Darkness investigates how a creative sound and land-based art practice can position humans as an active part of any given ecological system; equal to ‘other’ natural and non-human co-habitants. This practice-based research aims to discover how to frame or heighten natural environments to facilitate a focused mode of listening and perceiving that can encourage audiences to emotionally respond to an environment. This will be achieved through the use of; existing natural environments such as nature reserves, public parks, and national parks; aesthetic interventions including outlined paths, mirrored partitions, sheer partitions, and contemplative signage; written guides; and audience surveying. This research contributes to a community of practice including sound and land artists that consider investigations into and creative work regarding environmental conservation and rehabilitation a major and timely concern.

- by Jess A Pinney
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- Posthumanism, Public Art, Critical Posthumanism, Environmental Art
- by Alex V. Halapsis
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- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Cyborg Theory, Posthumanism

Posthumanism, now in the mainstream of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, poses a challenge to ethnomusicology, a discipline inherently focused on the human and social aspects of music. Drawing from a survey of birds in the ethnomusicological scholarship and the author's research on music and birds in Brazil, this article proposes an approach to ethnomusicology that emphasizes nonhuman factors and their own properties and effects as a method for better understanding music as a meaningful human phenomenon.

Internationally, an interest is emerging in a growing body of work on what has become known as ‘diffractive methodologies’ drawing attention to ontological aspects of research. Diffractive methodologies have largely been developed in response to a dissatisfaction with practices of ‘reflexivity’, which are seen to be grounded in a representational paradigm and the epistemological aspects of research. While work on ‘reflexivity’ and ‘critical reflection’ has over the years become predominant in educational and social science research methodology literature, our reading indicates that there is still important conceptual work to be done putting these two practices--reflection and diffraction--in conversation with each other and exploring their continuities and breaks as well as examining the consequences for research methodologies in education. This article raises important questions about how the concepts of diffraction and reflection are defined and understood and discusses the methodological implications for educational research.

- by Vivienne Bozalek and +2
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- Reflective Practice, Research Methodology, Higher Education, Posthumanism

This paper examines a variety of cyborg figures in science fiction and art, and investigates how these posthuman subject’s perceptual capacities are altered through their “cyborging,” how this might lead to greater intersubjective understanding and empathy, and advocates an embodied phenomenology for these figures. The cyborg and the posthuman are not necessarily synonymous but share similar political and ethical goals in theory: to radically redefine the human and the humanities, in order to see a way to better intersubjective and interspecies relations.
Ghost in The Shell, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Harbisson.

- by Katherine Bradley
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- Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Cyborg Theory, Posthumanism

Early literary instances of artificial humanoid and intelligent systems anticipate in a general way the kinds of thematic issues that cyborgs, androids, and intelligent networks like supercomputers bring up for the contemporary notion of the posthuman, understood as a condition in which the human and the machine are becoming increasingly intermingled. Humans have never really been autonomous entities, but rather have always been intimately interdependent upon their environments and tools. And their dreams of intelligent tools even extend back into the era of ancient Rome and Greece, as I will describe below. Thus the seemingly modern idea of a reciprocal dependency upon mechanical devices is just a variation of a much older theme.

- by Kevin LaGrandeur
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- Critical Theory, Philosophy, English Literature, Aristotle

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

- by Thomas Nail
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- Critical Theory, Religion, History, Social Movements

This article emerges from our relationship with Theo Combrinck, a colleague, a passionate social and academic activist, a recovering addict and a PhD student, who left our living space during 2014 ‒ a death that was unexpected yet a consequence of an iterative desire to end a troubled/ing life. The intensity of Theo's physical absence retains a vibrant presence and continues to intra-act with us as we consider socially just pedagogies. Theo's work lives on through memories, audio recordings and different forms of texts written by him, all representing his views of socially just pedagogy. Our entanglements with Braidotti's posthuman and Barad's diffractive methodologies shape our understandings of the past and present intra-actions with Theo in time and space. The Bozalek et al. Diffracting socially just pedagogies 202 generative process of our individual and collective becomings through Theo illustrate how the collaborative energy of co-constituted relationships contribute an affective response towards developing socially just pedagogies.

- by Belma Ogul and +1
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- Posthumanism, Music Aesthetics, Critical Posthumanism

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as personal autonomy or liberal freedom, it is morally unacceptable for transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by “deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructuralist philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, I show that the cyborg perspective is consistent with both cyborg humanism and a modified speculative posthumanism. This modified account treats the alterity of the posthuman as a historically emergent feature of human and posthuman multiplicities that must be understood through their technical or imaginative synthesis, not in relation to a transcendental conception of the human.

- by David Roden
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- Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Critical Posthumanism, Transhumanism/Posthumanism

La tesi presenta inizialmente il pensiero di Jacques Derrida sull'animalità. Il tema affrontato è la sovranità dell'uomo sul resto dei viventi, in particolare nei riguardi della discriminazione dell'animalità. Nei capitoli a seguire si attua un'emancipazione dell'animalità e non dall'animalità come la corrente umanista voleva. Attraverso l'ontogenesi del concetto di "umanità" viene decostruito il costrutto che sorregge la soglia che divide l'uomo dagli animali, laddove essi partecipano all'animalità in maniere differenti. L'emergenza di questa composizione dei temi trattati si erge ad azione esemplare con cui Derrida, prima di morire, ha lasciato delle tracce da seguire durante il ricevimento del premio Adorno.

- by Nicola Zengiaro
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- Philosophy, Ontology, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology

Se indaga el sentido de la conferencia de Sloterdijk
“Normas para el Parque humano” así como las
polémicas por ella suscitada. Se realiza un diagnóstico
de la capacidad crítica del humanismo tradicional. En el
marco del naufragio del humanismo como escuela y
utopía domesticadora humana -marco en el que
Sloterdijk reclama una revisión genético-técnica de la
humanidad- se indaga ¿qué criterios pueden
establecerse para normar las inevitables luchas por los
derechos de la crianza humana? ¿Quiénes y sobre qué
bases debieran hoy detentar el derecho a la crianza?
¿Cómo determinar quiénes son los que educan y los que
son educados? Se proponen nuevos caminos que
tienen en la mediación de la técnica su formulación
discursiva y sus orígenes en las disidencias que, desde
la propia tradición filosófica, reducían la estancia del
hombre en el mundo a su expresión leída y escrita.

- by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca
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- Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Movements

I examine the epistemological vision of the body as an accumulation of genes that has been developed by the UFO religion called the Raëlian Movement. I reflect it against various posthumanist theories and take an approach that has rarely been used in this domain: I analyze the aesthetic aspect of such scientific and religious models. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (ASRR) in 8: 1 2017, 101-125.

- by thorsten botz-bornstein
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- Human Evolution, Posthumanism, New Religions, Critical Posthumanism
- by Zulaikha Ayub
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- Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology of Science, Political Science

The proposal by the Committee on Legal Affairs (CLA) of the European Parliament to create a specific legal status for robots, aimed at granting the status of ‘electronic persons’ to the most sophisticated autonomous ones, has triggered a discussion on whether machines can achieve self-consciousness and free will. In particular, several Catholic thinkers have expressed perplexity about this hypothesis. Their criticism is often based on the postulates of Thomistic philosophical anthropology. In this article, after showing the magnitude of the debate by means of scientometric tools, we argue that it is premature to grant personhood rights to intelligent machines, but we also underline that, given the rapid development of arti cial intelligence, we should consider the plausibility of this scenario in the future. This is the case because contemporary sciences – in particular biology and computer science – pose a serious challenge to Thomistic anthropology and its modern derivations. We are also persuaded that the Catholic tradition is rich enough to make room for less rigid ideas about personhood and human nature. It seems advantageous to take into account the evolutionary perspective elaborated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, his idea of the ‘Noosphere’, that is, of a thinking planet that emerges thanks to the symbiotic evolution of humanity and machines, opening the door to the recognition of non-human persons and entrusting the mission of co-creators to human beings.

- by Riccardo Campa and +1
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- Artificial Intelligence, Ontology, Posthumanism, Ontology (Computer Science)

The article presents an attempt at analyzing selected narratives concerning the new media, seen as new communication technologies. We look at the construction of statements popular in social research -including statistical and prognostic research as - well as those carried out in the interactionist paradigm.
We indicate their limitations, in particular their utopian and conservative approach manifest in the concept of the information society, which has been dominant in the reflection on the new technologies. The conservative approach indicates the use of available dictionaries and concepts, which results in leaving significant elements influencing social life unnoticed, while considering only those secondary in relation to broader social processes (the new technologies are not the cause of these processes but their expression). On the other hand, we treat the utopian approach as one which unreflectively assumes a positive influence of these technologies on social life. In the second part of the article we refer to selected passages of the post-humanist narrative, treated as the basis for indicating other possibilities of problematizing the influence of the new communication technologies on social life. We put forward a cautious thesis that the modes of both thinking and writing about new technologies popular in the sociological narratives we have pointed out overlook the key transformations which have been taking place in the social field influenced by their developments. And these concern the change in the definitions of both the human and the social field.

- by Marcin Jewdokimow
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- New Media, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Bruno Latour
- by Fiona Cameron
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- Climate Change, Posthumanism, Adaptation to Climate Change, Climate change policy

Primer capítulo de introducción de la publicación “Traducir un bosque”, editada y coordinada por Santiago Morilla y publicada por la Diputación de Granada (2021): Los estudios y experimentos sobre comunicación entre plantas nos indican que todos los seres vivos nos relacionamos dentro de un complejo tejido de interdependencias que nos afectan de manera simbiótica, más allá de lo que los humanos podemos ver u oír, o siquiera creemos saber sobre ellas. Es más, pese a que la biomasa planetaria está esencialmente por plantas, siguen siendo las grandes desconocidas en nuestra cotidianeidad antropocéntrica. Desde este planteamiento, el proyecto “Traducir un bosque” pretende, con ayuda de la mediación tecnológica, hacer perceptible aquello que no vemos ni oímos, que ni siquiera sabemos o creemos saber sobre las plantas. “Traducir un bosque” despliega un sistema experimental de interacción simbólica entre humanos y plantas; una red que nos invita a considerar que no somos únicamente espectadores, sino cocreadores de la realidad que compartimos con el ecosistema vegetal, pero cuyos datos necesitan ser traducidos y acotados para ser –de nuevo– reobservados y reinterrogados desde otro lugar para la convivencia multiespecie.

- by Dawid Rogacz
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- Environmental Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, Environmental Education, Daoism

Might image have replaced substance; illusions substituted for ideas; language overwhelmed experience; text obfuscated world; now ignored the past? Might jargon mask authenticity; conversations censor criticism; affirmationism avoid argumentation; rhetoric swamp reality? Epistemology (and its methodologies) misunderstand ontology? Theory dominate practice? Mind overpower matter? Idealism deflate realism? North colonize South? At a recent academic conference in the South, nine of us grappled for four days with these “old” questions and their presence within the “new” discourse of “post” environmental education research. We struggled for an additional six-month period of email exchange to see and feel these questions in our own research. That slow, rich, and deeper academic exchange, as politics of judiciously engaging a collective form of criticism, culminated in identifying the research problem, and questions, of this specially assembled issue of The Journal of Environmental Education (JEE) about the role and place of allegedly new theory in the global discourse of allegedly post environmental education research. In translating our collective thought processes to a special issue (SI), we anticipate the reflexivity of the field will be critically advanced through engaging a number of emerging debates identified in the Introduction of the SI and in three “sample” articles specially written by Isabel Carvalho, Carlos Steil & Francisco Abraão Gonzaga, Louise Sund & Karen Pashby, and Phillip Payne, and an “in process” Conclusion written by Cae Rodrigues. There remains much work to do. This SI is only a start of reengaging overdue debates about the post.

- by Cae Rodrigues
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- Critical Theory, Epistemology, Environmental Education, Posthumanism

Following the worldwide popularity of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010), dystopian narratives took the young adult publishing world by storm. The subsequent dystopian boom in young adult literature offered readers dreadful new worlds that emerged from the ashes of contemporary society after it was destroyed by violent wars, climate change, deadly contagious diseases, and the like.As is widely understood (and some people still pretend to ignore), our society is currently facing an infectious disease that is straining the social order. Young adult dystopian literature has often represented the consequences of a pandemic – some of which consequences we are currently facing as a society today. From novels published at the beginning of this century, such as The Way We Fa l l by Megan Crewe (2002) and The Last Dog on Earth by Daniel Ehrenhaft (2003), to works like The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch (2011), Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin (2012-2013), and This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada (2017-2020), to highlight a few, this literature has explored the loss of human life, the paranoia caused by the fear of being infected, the struggle to find a cure, and how the infection (or the cure) can alter the human body – the body might evolve or retrogress, changing in ways such that it is no longer defined as human.This essay discusses how pandemics and their effects on the human body are represented in recent young adult dystopian texts through the lens of posthuman studies. My analysis will focus on three young adult series: James Dashner’s The Maze Runner trilogy (2009-2011), Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles (2012-2015), and Rory Power’s Wilder Girls (2019). In these works, the characters are confronted with the consequences of a viral outbreak, including zombie-like creatures and “unnatural” bodily changes. Due to these bodily changes, one can affirm that the infection provoked by the viral outbreak and/or cure creates posthuman bodies – bodies that threaten social norms by being different from the rule—forcing the reader to rethink what it actually means to be human and deconstructing the dominant idea implemented by the humanist worldview, where humanity is disconnected from the surrounding world.

In March 2015 Allahyari & Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a call to push creative technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. The 3D printer is a... more

- by Daniel Rourke and +1
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- Engineering, Chemistry, Design, Cyborg Theory

Ricordati di me. La rivoluzione digitale tra memoria e oblio è il titolo del saggio di Davide Sisto, pubblicato nel febbraio 2020 per la sezione Filosofia della casa editrice Bollati Boringhieri di Milano. Il testo, superata una lunga selezione, risulta ora essere tra i libri finalisti della sezione saggistica del Premio Napoli 2020, organizzato dall’omonima fondazione. Questo è uno dei tanti esempi – nonché ennesimo segnale – di un interesse sempre maggiore per le tematiche relative al digitale, in particolar modo al ruolo della memoria e il diritto all’oblio in tali contesti dopo la morte.

- by Francesco ㅤ D'Ambrosio
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- Sociology, Digital Media, Critical Posthumanism, Social Memory

Central to the Biblical story of the expulsion from Eden is the paradoxical concept of forbidden knowledge. Scrutinized by numberless historians of ideas, theologians and philosophers, this concept combines two seemingly incompatible impulses: curiosity and prohibition; or as Roger Shattuck describes it, " liberation and limits " .1 In order to know that something is forbidden one has to know what it is. Injunction on knowledge presupposes the knowledge of the injunction. By telling the first couple not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge God makes it certain that they will. The enigmatic story of the Fall simultaneously encourages inquiry and condemns it as impious or at least dangerous. The narrative of forbidden knowledge has reverberated through the millennia of Western culture, growing progressively more secularized as religion has lost its centrality. It has penetrated the discourse of science and particularly of the opposition to science in the name of humanism and/or conservative morality. It has shaped multiple political and social movements, from anti-pornography crusades to debates over childhood education. And perhaps most importantly, it has become part of our narrative imagination, creating a host of stories whose influence keeps growing even as their Biblical roots often go unnoticed. Most such stories today belong to the literary genre that focuses on epistemological issues par excellence: science fiction (SF). In this essay I will explore how the paradox of forbidden knowledge is reflected in SF and how the secularizing tendency of the genre lays bare some of the most problematic and intractable tensions of the Biblical text itself. I will look at the specific narrative strategies the genre deploys to come to terms with the aporia of the epistemic prohibition, in which an injunction on knowledge becomes the cause of its acquisition. In other words, knowledge does not precede the prohibition but is rather generated by it. And at the same time, the notion of forbidden knowledge requires the authority that can do the forbidding: the function fulfilled by God in the Biblical narrative but left empty in its secular versions. I will look at what can take place of God in SF narratives and consider the textual dynamics whereby " knowledge " and " prohibition " are tied in a circle, each enabling the other.

- by Elana Gomel
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- Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Science, Science Fiction, Critical Posthumanism

This article utilizes postqualitative inquiry, providing two critical readings – one from a critical-cultural poststructural perspective (rooted in intersectionality theory) and one from a critical posthumanist perspective – of one student’s relationship to race, class, and ethnicity across distributed social media spaces. The act of tagging-untagging as described by Miranda is central to unpacking the two critical readings offered in this article. How students understand, articulate, and potentially unpack race, ethnicity, and class in the digital age requires college student educators to move beyond traditional developmental theories, exploring and engaging the ambiguity of these socially constructed concepts in a technologically mediated world. This article advocates that discussions of race, ethnicity, and class in the 21st century must account for digital social media spaces as well as new forms of inquiry - reading and plugging data into multiple theoretical perspectives.

- by Paul W Eaton
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- Self and Identity, Higher Education, Digital Media, Posthumanism

This paper attempts to explore the relevance of affective phenomena in the genealogy of cultural and philosophical posthumanism. In its genealogical endeavour, this article expands the lens of posthuman by taking up Spinoza's notion of "affectio" and "affectus" from his Ethics. The paper would also argue how emotional competence makes AI more performative. Given that a new pathway for mental health has been opened up while emotions (on both sides) are activated, modulated, and exchanged to a biological and a nonbiological entity. The trajectory of this paper would take up social theorists and philosophers like Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari to trace the affective phenomena in Spike Jonze's academy awardwinning film Her (2013).

- by Ars Artium
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- American Literature, Cultural Studies, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy
- by Gabriella Calchi Novati
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- Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology

The greenhouse is a kind of ripening time machine, mediating the technologies of intensive growth, high energy inputs, harvests, and the exhaustive labour required so that crops do not spoil. The relentlessness and synchronicity of greenhouse ripening, the conditions of work it requires, and the condensation of crop space produces a need for a kind of labour that is ultimately untenable, and thus orchestrated by drawing from historical founts of racialized exploitation. What appears to be a necessary federal program to insource temporary foreign agricultural labour is actually, then, a “greenhouse effect”.

- by Krista Lynes
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- Gender Studies, Media Studies, Border Studies, Critical Race Theory

Posthuman Suffering investigates the core assumptions of posthumanist discourse via philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and close textual and filmic readings of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Steven Spielberg's film, AI: Artificial Intelligence, bringing the more ontological and epistemological implications of posthumanism to the forefront. In the age of technology our own limitations are legitimized as unique to the human condition.

Death has always been the darkest mystery known to humanity. The only meaning of it within our grasp is "the end", end of everything. So, from the beginning of the time being, people always have dreamt of conquering death. No matter how challenging the life on earth is, no one in straight mind wants it to end. From here, starts the quest of immortality. May be the urge to gain immortality took birth at the event of the very first death encountered by human beings. This desperate attempt to attain a never-ending life can be seen in many ancient religious books, epics, myths fables and stories.

- by Umme Rooman
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- Popular Culture, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Transhumanism

Due to development of science we are in the situation of an intervention in the complex area of nature without being able to yet identify the inflection point from which the artificial created by the natural man becomes in turn natural. Perhaps this is just another strong sense of singularity, Consciousness Singularity (CS) is the key moment of this transition. By CS we understand the ability of a consciousness to understand what consciousness is. It is to know in a scientific sense, that brings along prediction with it, the possibility to create a consciousness, finalizing the status of human creator. Instead of the leap assumed by TS the key challenge is the "revolution of consciousness", generated by the new understanding of humanity brought along by CS. Most of the arguments in favour of Technological Singularity (TS) involves the possibility of a qualitative leap based on the quantitative accumulation, missing the problem represented by the knowledge of consciousness. We cannot predict the time / period when the CS occurs or provide strong arguments for the burst of the CS. We think, however, that TS assumes CS. Namely, that the debate about TS is really about CS. The prediction of CS consequences is impossible. The study of consciousness inevitably changes the human’s image and that of the society, finally resulting in the redefining of humanity. Contrary to many expectations emerged on the marketplace of ideas, it is not the switch to trans-humanism the one that will characterize such a change, but the redefining of the humane. Not the post-humanism, but the new humanism is the social-moral objective of the socio-moral consciousness research results. The main feature of the humane is the all-humane: the tendency of people to remain within the humanity regardless of the severity of the practiced behaviours.

- by Rotila Viorel
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- Philosophy of Mind, Posthumanism, Consciousness, Critical Posthumanism

This paper reflects on the role of computation in speculative design. It suggests that found, unexpected traces of computational processes can amplify designers’ imagination. This theme is considered through a reflection on a practical workflow that pays close attention to the artifacts of algorithmically generated mesh geometries. The resulting interpretation of found artifacts as active participants in design processes is innovative in the field where computational objects (such as meshes) are typically thought of as neutral tools. Reconsideration of meshes as objects with agency can be extended to other computational entities, resulting in significant implications for design thinking and design craftsmanship.

- by Stanislav Roudavski and +1
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- Critical Theory, Philosophy, Ontology, Aesthetics

The ethics of human enhancement has been a hotly debated topic in the last 15 years. In this debate, some advocate examining science fiction stories to elucidate the ethical issues regarding the current phenomenon of human enhancement. Stories from science fiction seem well suited to analyze biomedical advances, providing some possible case studies. Of particular interest is the work of screenwriter Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne, In Time, and Good Kill), which often focuses on ethical questions raised by the use of new technologies. Examining the movie In Time (2011), the aim of this paper is to show how science fiction can contribute to the ethical debate of human enhancement. In Time provides an interesting case study to explore what could be some of the consequences of radical life-extension technologies. In this paper, we will show how arguments regarding radical life-extension portrayed in this particular movie differ from what is found in the scientific literature. We will see how In Time gives flesh to arguments defending or rejecting radical life-extension. It articulates feelings of unease, alienation and boredom associated with this possibility. Finally, this article will conclude that science fiction movies in general, and In Time in particular, are a valuable resource for a broad and comprehensive debate about our coming future.

- by Johann A R Roduit
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- Bioethics, Posthumanism, Medical Humanities, Science Fiction
- by Kai Wortmann
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- Pragmatism, Education, Practice theory, Philosophy of Education

As the introduction to the special issue of Leisure Sciences dedicated
to interdisciplinary theorizations and practices productively informed
by our posthuman predicament and currents within posthumanist
thought, this article sets the stage, tone, and itinerary for a series of
articles examining the various potentials posthumanism affords. As
such, we attempt to connect multiple ways posthumanism may be
taken up with key concepts, linguistic identifiers, and onto-epistemological
shifts that may open upon important differences in how we
live, think, and relate with human and nonhuman entities. Resisting
melancholic laments at the failures of humanism, we urge for an
affirmative, upbeat, and visionary approach to set a different trajectory
for our future. This article is intended to serve as a point of
departure for scholars desiring to experiment with what posthumanism
can do to generate changes and accelerations for a more
humane, if not less human-centric, future.

- by Brian Kumm
- •
- Posthumanism, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Critical Posthumanism, Leisure Studies
- by Joanna Jeśman
- •
- Animal Studies, Critical Posthumanism
- by C. S. Bhagya
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- Cyborg Theory, Film Theory, Posthumanism, Science Fiction
- by Katharina Motyl
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- Disability Studies, Queer Theory, Posthumanism, Critical Race Theory