Non-human Agents Research Articles

Contributions of Barad's New Materialism to Well-Being Research

In this article, we discuss the contributions that Karen Barad's theorizations can make to the study of well-being, particularly their ontoepistemological framework, “agential realism,” that emphasizes the inseparability of matter, ethics, and knowledge, as the relational entanglements of agencies. We use these ideas to imagine well-being as differential materializations, entanglements of human, and the non-human agencies that “intra-act” with each other and are inseparable from how we know about them and our responsibilities in their reconfigurations. From this perspective, we see well-being as a phenomenon, underpinning its dynamism and processuality. Analyzing an interview fragment, we exemplify how Barad's theorizations can offer a different way to think about well-being, recognizing the differences within and the consequences of thinking about it as being otherwise. We argue that this approach opens new possibilities and research trajectories that expand the field of well-being studies, understanding well-being studies as a more local, dynamic, open-ended phenomenon.

Voices from the Other Side: Exploring Nonhuman Agents and Their Narrative Function in the Zhuangzi

In the history of Chinese literature, the Zhuangzi authors were the first to grant a voice to diverse forms of life, among them a snake, a tree, a dead man, a divine turtle, and even the wind. What exactly is the interest of incorporating nonhuman protagonists in brief literary fictions? Was there something at stake when trying out this pioneering narrative technique, or was it just for the sake of literary innovation and entertainment? Through a detailed analysis of a set of concise narratives, this study uncovers a consistent critique of the religious institutions (chiefly divination and sacrifice), as well as the economic practices prevalent during the Warring States period. It aims to demonstrate that the Zhuangzi's comprehensive critique of the Zhou cultural order achieves its “hearability” through a recurrent use of striking dualities, including day and night, dream and wakefulness, and humans and nonhumans. A heretofore silent and passive community of living beings raises its voice and is able to challenge the well-established discourse proclaiming human sovereignty over the natural world. These voices and the themes they raise serve, among other things, as a literary strategy intended to illuminate the universality of violence and the criminal essence of human culture (wen 文).

Not Relational Enough? Towards an Eco-Relational Approach in Robot Ethics

With robots increasingly integrated into various areas of life, the question of relationships with them is gaining prominence. Are friendship and partnership with robots possible? While there is already extensive research on relationships with robots, this article critically examines whether the relationship with non-human entities is sufficiently explored on a deeper level, especially in terms of ethical concepts such as autonomy, agency, and responsibility. In robot ethics, ethical concepts and considerations often presuppose properties such as consciousness, sentience, and intelligence, which are exclusively aligned with humans. I will challenge the understanding of these properties by anchoring them in contexts, bodies, and actions. This approach allows to consider the specific ways of being of various human and non-human entities and to identify these properties in non-human entities as well. My “eco-relational” approach posits that it is crucial to consider the relationality with non-human entities such as animals and technology in central ethical concepts from the beginning. This approach reflects the “eco”, the entire house in which we live including animals and robots. To support this, I examine two dominant approaches in robot ethics within the contemporary Western tradition: the “properties approach” and modestly relational approaches. I will develop an eco-relational approach as an alternative. Employing a phenomenological method, I will demonstrate through various examples that our properties and actions are inherently connected with non-human entities. I will show that robots play a central role in our properties and actions, leading to concepts such as hybrid actions and non-human agency. It becomes clear that technology and our relationships with it disrupt traditional ethical concepts.

Machine vision situations: Tracing distributed agency.

This article proposes a new method for tracing and examining agency in heterogeneous assemblages, focusing on the role of machine vision technologies in creative works. We introduce the concept of the "machine vision situation" and define it as the moment in which machine vision technologies come into play and make a difference to the course of events. By taking situations as the unit of analysis, we identify moments at which machine vision technologies take part in actions without reducing them to either tools or protagonists, instead allowing for more complex agential entanglements between human and non-human actors. Grounded on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this article demonstrates how an analytical unit such as the machine vision situation is a valuable method for tracing how agency is distributed. We illustrate this through three examples by applying the method to creative works - narratives, digital games, and artworks - revealing key aspects of distributed agency and calling attention to the excess, complications, and messy entanglements that might otherwise be overlooked in analyses of agential assemblages. The machine vision situation is shown to be a flexible unit of analysis that can be productively incorporated in both quantitative and qualitative studies and applied to other contexts in which human and non-human agencies interact.

Resilience engineering for highly automated driving, autonomous vehicles, and urban robotics: wizards and shepherds in hybrid societies

Introducing automated vehicles into road traffic and robots into urban public environments puts artificial agents in space-sharing conflicts with humans. Humans anticipate, avoid, and smoothly resolve space-sharing conflicts by implicit and explicit communication enabled by uniquely human shared intentionality. Smooth coordination among artificial, partly automated, teleoperated, and human agents needs to be supported by coactive design optimizing observability, predictability, and directability to foster robustness of operation. Available humans should be employed by ‘wizard interfaces’ to support automation, for example, in recognizing intentions, in anticipating difficulties, and in predicting for foresighted coordination. Human capabilities are not just helpful for efficiency and robustness but necessary to cope with exceptional events and failures. For quickly removing blocks and resuming operation, available humans should be employed and authorized by measures of ‘shepherd raising’. Because non-human agents are at a disadvantage in public environments and potentially block operation for extended intervals if they are bullied or denied help, benevolence and cooperation are essential in hybrid societies. Cooperation in public environments is higher in functional societies and can be fostered towards artificial agents in particular by coactive design increasing trust, by influencing mindless and mindful anthropomorphism, and further determinants of reciprocal altruism.

A Review of Posthumanist Education Research: Expanded Conceptions of Research Possibility and Responsibility

The influence of posthumanist philosophies—broadly defined to include theories such as Baradian new materialism, Deleuzian assemblage theory, Wynterian counterhumanism, Afro-futurism studies, Indigenous studies theories of nonhuman agency, and others—on education research has been increasing at an exponential rate. This chapter provides a review of this literature organized around the theme of ethical and political responsibility. It compares four genres of posthumanist inquiry: assemblage studies, cartographic studies, diffractive studies, and place-based research. It locates these genres on a continuum from descriptive to enactive forms of inquiry. The review concludes with an examination of three different conceptions of futurity that inform posthumanist reconceptualizations of research responsibility, suggesting research is most powerful when all three are attended to in research designs.

Hunting, Planting and Malaria: How Cameroonian Ecosystems Changed the Basel Missionaries’ Worldviews

How did the land change the missionary? Almost all early missionaries, sent by the Basel Mission to the African colony Kamerun of the German Empire, died of malaria ( Klimafieber). On the fourth day after arrival in 1886 the first missionary died. In any case, Cameroonian ecosystems reshaped the self-conception and worldviews of missionaries. They used hunter's language, romanticised and conquered the land and its imagined virgin forests; Basel missionaries became strangers to themselves – involved in plantation policy, violent against, but at the same time absolutely dependent on, the local population. Most anthropological or historical studies on the Basel Mission and other Protestant missions in Cameroon focus on politics, economics, education and how the missionaries did change the land. However, how African agency influenced missionaries’ perspectives and activities is rarely acknowledged or discussed, which has so far limited historiographical works to a humanocentric understanding of mission. The article explores how the worldviews of the missionaries (especially Friedrich Autenrieth, Paul Steiner and Heinrich Norden) were challenged by the natural environment. In particular, it investigates how concepts of God, mission, culture/nature and human were renegotiated and reshaped while working and travelling the land. This analysis of printed travelogues, novels and articles therefore combines the question of the missionaries’ reactions to climate, disease, fauna, flora and the montane environment with an examination of how these were presented to specific target groups. To concentrate on the agency of African ecosystems consequently decentres the historiography of Christian mission that has separated the human from the non-human agency of nature. 1

‘It’s all about connecting’: using visual methods to surface the multisensory and more-than-human dimensions of health information

Human bodies and health states are becoming increasingly digitised and datafied through the use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, apps and software, electronic medical records and social media platforms. The ways that people learn about their bodies and health through their encounters with other people, living things and elements of the natural environment are often invisible in portrayals of digital health technologies. This article reports on a project in which we sought to surface more-than-digital, multisensory, affective and more-than-human modes of learning and knowing about health and wellbeing. This project involved a series of qualitative online workshops which incorporated two visually based activities: participants’ creation of maps of personal health information ecologies, and their responses to photographic prompts showing aspects of natural environments. These maps and images inspired participants to express and discuss their thoughts and feelings related to the ways they learn about and conceptualise their health and wellbeing from and with a diverse set of human and nonhuman agents. Taking this approach, we were able to develop an understanding of digital health technologies and health literacies within the more-than-digital contexts and complex health information ecologies of people’s everyday lives.

Camel Ownership as a Passage to Adulthood in Omani Bedouin Culture

ABSTRACT The development of adolescent humans through child–pet interaction and attachment is the focus of the current study. The context is the Omani Bedouin culture, which is inseparably linked to camel culture. This culture promotes the importance of nurturing relationships between camels and their cameleers. We suggest that proximity to and contact with camels from an early age helps camel-owning Bedouin children to navigate their journey more smoothly from childhood to adulthood. The study is based on informal conversations, collected over 1 year, with Bedouin children and their parents who have all grown up with camels in Al Wahiba, a Bedouin people of the Sharqiyah, Oman. By analyzing such narratives, we aimed to demonstrate the depth of impact that this contact with camels has on the cognitive, emotional, and social development of Bedouin children. The data suggest that child cameleers experience emotional, social, and cognitive benefits from contact with and attachment to camels. The findings from the parents of these adolescents also suggest that the children demonstrate higher levels of cognitive and emotional maturity and seem to socialize and become integrated into the community more easily compared with their siblings who do not own camels. The novelty of the current study is that it sheds light on how the socio-cultural context embedded in the Bedouin culture affects the degree and nature of a child’s attachment to a pet camel and how that affects development in adolescence. The research took an inclusive approach by including both human and nonhuman agents (camels) in the analysis, and we discuss the findings in a post-colonial context.

Learning within fiber-crafted algorithms: Posthumanist perspectives for capturing human-material collaboration

AbstractA key commitment of computer-supported collaborative learning research is to study how people learn in collaborative settings to guide development of methods for capture and design for learning. Computer-supported collaborative learning research has a tradition of studying how the physical world plays a part in collaborative learning. Within the field, a material turn is emerging that considers how digital and tangible technologies actively contribute to collaborative learning processes. Studying how tangible materials produce collaborative learning visibly and algorithmically is particularly important at a time when advanced algorithms are integrated into educational contexts in ways that are not always transparent. However, the needed methodologies for capturing how non-human agents take part in collaborative learning remains underdeveloped. The present study builds on current CSCL research that investigates materials in collaborative learning and introduces posthumanist perspectives with the aim to decenter humans methodologically and to probe empirically whether and how these perspectives contribute to empirical understanding of collaborative learning processes. Taking fiber crafts (e.g., weaving and fabric manipulation) as a context for computational learning, the present study conducted a posthumanist analysis of differences among human and non-human participants in collaboration using video data to investigate how middle school youths and fiber craft components performed algorithms over time. The findings show how both youths and craft materials actively contributed to the performance of algorithms. In weaving, algorithms became repeated youth-material movements one dimension at a time. In fabric manipulation, algorithms became a repeated confluence of component parts. Decentering humans through an analysis of differences among human and non-human introduced human-material collaboration as a productive unit of analysis for understanding how materials and people together contribute to producing what can be recognized as computational performance. The findings of this research contribute to ongoing conversations in CSCL research on how computational materials can be considered in collaborative learning and present a new approach to capture collaborative learning as physical expansion over time. The study has implications for future research on capturing collaborative computational learning and designing physical computational learning opportunities that show technology as evolving.

Age assemblages : Sociotechnical innovations and successful age(ing) from the perspective of material gerontology

Individual-centered approaches have for a long time defined the gerontological involvement with technology. Despite an approach that expands in terms of space (e.g., neighborhood approaches) or social networks (e.g., caring communities), these approaches are characterized by centering on people as working alone. Material gerontological approaches attempt to theoretically and empirically address this entanglement of humans and technology by decentralizing the human and conceptualizing agency as being distributed among human and nonhuman agents. Drawing on ongoing debates in material gerontology aconcept of age assemblages is developed with which age(ing) can be understood as aprocess distributed between older people, objects, technologies and spaces. At the same time this involves how such theoretical concepts can be applied in the practice of sociotechnical innovations in order to promote successful ageing. Based on various empirical research studies, the article exemplifies amaterial gerontological perspective. It is shown how an expansion of gerontology towards more than human worlds of age(ing) can be conceived. The focus is on (1)adecentralization of age(ing) towards "age assemblages", (2)a broadening of the individual human to a distributed more than human agency and, as aresult, (3)ashift in the boundaries of research phenomena in gerontology. The article closes with reflections on what the developed concept of age assemblages means for gerontological research and practice.

The Consequences of Anthropomorphic and Teleological Beliefs in a Global Pandemic.

To describe something in terms of its purpose or function is to describe its teleology. Previous studies have found that teleological beliefs are positively related to anthropomorphism, and that anthropomorphism decreases the perceived unpredictability of non-human agents. In the current study, we explore these relationships using the highly salient example of beliefs about the coronavirus pandemic. Results showed that both anthropomorphism and teleology were negatively associated with perceived uncertainty and threat, and positively associated with self-reported behavioural change in response to the pandemic. These findings suggest that highly anthropomorphic and teleological individuals may view coronavirus as agentive and goal-directed. While anthropomorphic and teleological beliefs may facilitate behavioural change in response to the pandemic, we also found that the associated reduction in uncertainty and threat may be detrimental to behavioural change. We discuss the implications of these findings for messaging about global events more broadly.

Moral conformity in a digital world: Human and nonhuman agents as a source of social pressure for judgments of moral character.

Could judgments about others' moral character be changed under group pressure produced by human and virtual agents? In Study 1 (N = 103), participants first judged targets' moral character privately and two weeks later in the presence of real humans. Analysis of how many times participants changed their private moral judgments under group pressure showed that moral conformity occurred, on average, 43% of the time. In Study 2 (N = 138), we extended this using Virtual Reality, where group pressure was produced either by avatars allegedly controlled by humans or AI. While replicating the effect of moral conformity (at 28% of the time), we find that the moral conformity for the human and AI-controlled avatars did not differ. Our results suggest that human and nonhuman groups shape moral character judgments in both the physical and virtual worlds, shedding new light on the potential social consequences of moral conformity in the modern digital world.

Ethics and aesthetics of adaptive heritage reuse in Europe: an introduction to what happens to territories when heritage is touched

PurposeThe paper introduces ethical and aesthetical implications emerging from participative forms of adaptive heritage reuse. Its aim is to depict the overall framework to contextualize the investigations explored in the Special Issue titled “Ethics and aesthetics of adaptive heritage reuse in Europe.” Therefore, the article confronts with potentialities and contradictions of “open” heritage processes, introducing key critical elements to recode heritage practices and planning in today’s conjuncture of global change.Design/methodology/approachThe paper drawn on a literature review, which combines different bodies of studies: heritage, urban studies, care studies and recent policy documents. A photographic essay, moreover, serves to “augment” the presented argumentations through a visual apparatus resulting from one of Gaia Ginevra Giorgi’s artwork, which develops in the intersection between performative art, participation and territorial reuse.FindingsThe author argues that for adaptive heritage reuse to be really sustainable, ethical and aesthetical heritage codes need to be reassessed and reoriented toward the present socio-ecological priorities, multiplicating the ways cultural heritage is conceived, valued and reused. The paper suggests proceeding along the creative paths of uncertainty, providing the first elements to develop political projects of abundance and enjoyment for current urban settlements.Practical implicationsThe presented argumentations can be used as a baseline by heritage managers and policymakers to experiment with participative processes of adaptive heritage reuse and to identify more environmentally and socially just trajectories of urban development.Originality/valueThe paper expands the concept of adaptive heritage reuse, considering the active participation of both human and non-human agents. Treating heritage in a laic way, namely free from absolute and preordered judgments of value, it deals with uncomfortable heritage materiality and contexts, illuminating the quality of unpleasant or odd forms of beauty.

Defining the Anthropocene tropical forest: Moving beyond ‘disturbance’ and ‘landscape domestication’ with concepts from African worldviews

How natural and cultural forces shaping tropical forested landscapes are conceptualised is of vital importance to Anthropocene debates. We examine two concepts: disturbance and landscape domestication. From the perspective of disturbance, humans – whether ancient or modern – are a priori negative for tropical forests, outside of and alien to nature. From this view, the Anthropocene is a planetary scale aggregation of disturbance. A more just vision of tropical forests, accepting anthropogenic influence on biodiversity, would combine ‘disturbance’ with other concepts that capture human agency and intentionality. Landscape domestication proposes that humans can shape ecology and plant and animal population demographics, making the landscape more productive and congenial for humans, upgrading or degrading the biodiversity of tropical forests. Herein, forest peoples shape the Anthropocene itself through their ‘domestication’ of the forest. Yet this approach can overdetermine culture, ignoring non-human agency, whilst human impacts can be seen as the outcome of intentional modifications to increase landscape productivity, at worst a disavowed projection of ‘economic man’. Using the convivial scholarship framework of Nyamnjoh, we argue that these ideas give incomplete views of tropical forests in the Anthropocene and can be enriched by concepts derived from African worldviews with ‘relationality’ and ‘wholeness’ at their core. These are expressed in ohanife, deriving from Igbo language, ubuntu, from the Nguni language and ukama, a notion from Shona culture. Together these concepts evince an ‘eco-bio-communitarianism’ embracing humans, God, spirits, ancestors, animals and inanimate beings in a ‘community of beings’ irreducible to the culture-nature divide (moving beyond disturbance) and allowing for the agency and personhood of non-humans (moving beyond historical ecology). This is consonant with Indigenous Amazonian worldviews, such as that of Kopenawa. Approaching human-nature relations from Nyamnjoh’s idea of conviviality, we elaborate a less incomplete and more just perspective on the cultural and natural shaping of Anthropocene tropical forests.

AQUEOUS POSTHUMAN FEMINISM IN PAOLO BACIGALUPI'S THE WATER KNIFE

Climate fiction has intractably delved into the ecological dismay about the imminent disastrous repercussions of anthropogenic climate change. The posthuman propensities of these texts actualized by the depiction of imaginative worlds digressing from manifest conditions subvert anthropocentric standpoints and point out nonhuman agencies. Detailed analysis of climate fictions by employing feminist posthumanist figurations foregrounding a feminist ethic of difference, mutuality and care can bring to light their potential to offer imaginative realms outside the fallacies of human supremacy. The present work endeavours a watery incursion into Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife and attempts to view it through posthumanist feminist aqueous imagery put forward by the cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. It also explores how water in the novel engenders a fresh imaginative space through its diversified techniques.

Democracy and planetary politics: Achille Mbembe and futures of digital citizenship education for life

ABSTRACT Building on critical, performative, and emancipatory visions for digital citizenship education, this paper analyzes social media within systems of global capitalism in a time of climate crisis, which not only introduce opaquely complex agencies but shape relations on a planetary scale. To reconceptualize digital citizenship education in a computational age, with consideration for just relations and the future health of the planet, this paper draws on the work of African philosopher Achille Mbembe, who articulates how plasticity among human and non-human agencies is being used within capitalist systems to take power over the living – a power that is shaped by colonial hierarchies. In place of individualism, Mbembe’s philosophy emphasizes the need for collective action to repair harms and work across differences towards protection and sharing of what we have in-common. Connecting his thinking to digital citizenship, there is potential for education to support decolonial disenclosure of social media’s capitalist capture and engage in deep historical learning towards the replacement of exclusionary, necropolitical forces with care and communing in support of life. This paper offers possibilities and provocations for digital citizenship education, inviting readers to respond in their own contexts in ways that consider our planetary relations.

Beyond the author: Artificial intelligence, creative writing and intellectual emancipation

This study explores university students’ engagement with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools for creative writing and graphic storytelling, drawing on Jacques Rancière's philosophy of intellectual equality and emancipation. Qualitative data analysis from a co-curricular creative writing programme, including reflections, surveys, and focus-group interviews, reveals emerging artificial intelligence literacies and students’ improvisational aptitudes for interpreting, subverting, and transforming notions of authorship. Students decentred authorial attribution through the pragmatic adoption of the technology as a creative catalyst, negotiated creative conventions by adopting non-conventional communication strategies, and reconceptualised creativity as distributed across human and non-human agents. Our approach of student-driven learning for autonomous exploration, sense-making, and criticality with GenAI indicates the potential for promoting conditions for students to exercise intellectual equality and emancipation. The findings contribute to the understanding of authorship and creativity; begin to contour emerging GenAI literacies and competencies; and suggest that creative collaborations with GenAI may be a promising way to foster emancipatory practices in the classroom, while nurturing creative and critical skills.

Palaeoliths and Pareidolia: Photography and Archaeological Stone Collecting From the Discovery of Deep Time to the Eolith Controversies

Photography played an important part in the revelation of deep time in the later nineteenth century, leading to the invention of a new epoch – the palaeolithic. This article investigates how photography participated in creating palaeoliths, eoliths, and stone collectables in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when the boundaries between artefacts and non-artefacts, culture and nature, were at issue. I examine the emergence of visual conventions for depicting ancient stone implements in archaeological publications and museums and the development of standardized artefact photography. I investigate how the mechanical objectivity of photography was deployed in archaeological experiments demonstrating that eoliths, like photographs, could be produced using non-human agencies. I explore the utopian and left-wing cultures of collecting and photographing figure-stones and picture-stones; collecting cultures based around an alternative connoisseurship of pareidolia – the “primitive” skill of discerning animals, faces and body parts in stones. Comparing case studies of authenticated, unauthenticated, and, hoax artefacts, I examine how authentication practices preserved the personal authority of archaeological specialists, by emphasizing encounters between experts and stones, over those between experts and photographs. Photography always had the potential to destabilize the power relations of archaeological authentication, but, in practice, reinforced and extended them.

Introduction

ABSTRACT Studies of affect center the porous non-enclosure of bodies and psyches, and temporality is crucial to our interpretations of violence, loss, rebellion, and change. The authors in this issue collectively demonstrate the inadequacy of colonialist and masculinist notions of static self-sovereign subjects in political theology. While affectability is frequently invoked for racialized and gendered modes of demonization or dismissal, the contributors to this special issue show the key role that it also plays in transforming power relations. The essays differ in the extent to which they foreground religious communities and practice, relations to nation-states, and divine or non-human agency. Together, however, they loosen assumptions about affect that limit visions for living otherwise and point to moments where we might glimpse such possibilities.