Non-human Relations Research Articles

Beyond humanism: telling response-able stories about significant otherness in human–chatbot relations

AI-enabled chatbots intended to build social relations with humans are becoming increasingly common in the marketplace, with millions of registered users using these chatbots as virtual companions or therapists. These chatbots make use of what is often called the “Eliza effect”—the tendency of human users to attribute human-like knowledge and understanding to a computer program. A common interpretation of this phenomenon is to consider this form of relating in terms of delusion, error, or deception, where the user misunderstands or forgets they are talking to a computer. As an alternative, we draw on the work of feminist Science and Technology Studies scholars as providing a robust and capacious tradition of thinking and engaging with human–nonhuman relationships in non-reductive ways. We closely analyze two different stories about encounters with chatbots, taking up the feminist STS challenge to attend to the agency of significant otherness in the encounter. The first is Joseph Weizenbaum's story about rejecting the ELIZA chatbot technology he designed to mimic a therapist as a monstrosity, based on his experiences watching others engage with it. The second is a story about Julie, who experiences a mental health crisis, and her chatbot Navi, as told through her descriptions of her experiences with Navi in the recent podcast Radiotopia presents: Bot Love. We argue that a reactionary humanist narrative, as presented by Weizenbaum, is incapable of attending to the possibilities of pleasure, play, or even healing that might occur in human–chatbot relatings. Other forms of engaging with, understanding, and making sense of this new technology and its potentialities are needed both in research and mental health practice, particularly as more and more patients will begin to use these technologies alongside engaging in traditional human-led psychotherapy.

“Everything Kills Everything Else in Some Way”: An Ecocritical Reading of Human – Non-Human Relationships in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

ABSTRACT This article investigates the ecocritical implications of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) by analyzing the main character's paradoxical relationship to the non-human world. The novella's aged and therefore untypical Hemingway protagonist, Santiago, is a remarkably compassionate, unselfish, and likeable character. What makes him likeable is his unprejudiced openness to the world, his love for animals as well as for human beings, and his own self-interrogation. He perceives the creatures of the sea as his friends and brothers, but nevertheless he kills them. The article argues that though Santiago reveals a bourgeoning environmental consciousness quite modern for its time, he also represents the blind spots humans have concerning their relation to the non-human world.

Rethinking Human and Non-Human Relationships in Curriculum Studies: Implications of a Socio-Material Approach

Rethinking Human and Non-Human Relationships in Curriculum Studies: Implications of a Socio-Material Approach

Emotional Management Strategies and Care for Women Defenders of the Territory in Jalisco

The struggles of several women defending their territories and lives are marked by family tensions and reactions to the overload of care tasks and community rules according to their socially established roles. In this qualitative research, we analyze and discuss the cases of three women’s collectives from different suburban and rural communities in Jalisco. Information recollected through the new ethnography approach over six years was coded and analyzed with the Atlas ti program. Results: Women’s defense of their land involvement, organizing, and social mobilization actions move to an overload of care and raise adverse reactions in their community and families in response to what is seen as a transgression of women’s roles. This increases dominant demobilization emotions: fear, sadness, loneliness, guilt, and shame. Through emotional management strategies linked with alternative forms of appropriation of space, starting with their bodies and sharing emotions and actions with their companions, the women in these collectives produced emotions of resistance: pride, hope, friendship, and anger, which led to reconfiguring their identities, family relationships, and roles within other place domains: bodies, family, and community. Conclusions: Women defenders, as principal carers of life, have produced and inherited a set of strategies that configure a growing “politics of the ordinary. “These strategies, through emotional management, subvert dominant emotions, feelings, and acting rules, gradually questioning and reinventing their roles and human and nonhuman relations in their most immediate contexts.

Sweet Archipelagos: Sugar, Empires, and the Making of a Transpacific Insect Trail

Abstract: In 1854, a whaling vessel brought two bundles of sugarcane from Tahiti to Maui, marking the beginning of the Lahaina cane's history and the socioecological transformation of the Hawaiian Islands and the Asia-Pacific. This essay tells a history of sugar through the transpacific crossings of three nonhuman species: sugarcane, the sugarcane beetle borer, and the tachinid fly. It situates nonhuman actors within the historical context of plantation agriculture, capitalist imperialism, and biological globalization of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Pacific to reconceptualize entomological categories like "pest" and "parasite." Engaging with actor-network theory, animal studies, and island studies, the essay attempts to offer insights into historical agency, human–nonhuman relations, and large-scale ecological change.

Fluid land values in petro-geographies: Temporality and human–nonhuman relations in Ghana and Tanzania

Fluid land values in petro-geographies: Temporality and human–nonhuman relations in Ghana and Tanzania

Listening to the Virtual Greenhouse: Musics, Sounding, and Online Plantcare

Abstract Plantcare is having a moment. Recent years have seen an outpouring of audiovisual content across several social media platforms, wherein humans film and photograph themselves taking care of houseplants. These self-proclaimed “plant moms” build community through their shared passion for caring for houseplants and showing this form of tree-hugging to a wider community. In this contribution, I theorize this plant-filled digital terrain as a virtual greenhouse, a space where humans can perform with and show off their collections of houseplants. This virtual greenhouse points to how plantcare becomes a space to play with expectations of humanness apart from human–animal boundaries. Furthermore, contrary to notions of plants as being silent or inaudible lifeforms, this virtual greenhouse is rich with music and sound. Following an exploration of the overarching features of plantcare content and other kinds of digital human–nonhuman representations, I describe how creators in the virtual greenhouse use ASMR-like techniques, acousmatic narration, and reinterpretations of popular music to make their intimate relationships with nonhuman life audible. This contribution demonstrates how these human–plant assemblages engage with a “back-to-nature” environmentalism and present opportunities to reframe human–nonhuman relationships through creative practice.

Lo Tiwa: Ritual of Human and Non-Human Relationship in Lembata Regency, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia

Lo Tiwa: Ritual of Human and Non-Human Relationship in Lembata Regency, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia

Concrete: An Introduction

Max D. Woodworth and Cecilia L. Chu argue that concrete must be approached in ways that capture its dynamic material properties and its impacts on human and nonhuman relations over time.

The Birth of Hirudiculture: Parisian Medicine, Leech Farming and the Transformation of Marshland in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis , the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Posthumanism philosophy in nursing profession

Posthumanism represents a dynamic and continually evolving movement, positing that advancements in science and technology, over time, will lead to the displacement of humans by machines, diminishing the human role in the world [1, 2]. It contends that the core of learning encompasses diverse factors, rejecting the centrality of humanism [3]. Consequently, nursing practices must adapt to societal changes influenced by post-humanist ideals [1]. Nurses are urged to comprehend the evolving landscape of post-humanism in nursing education, research, and knowledge [4]. Within the post-humanist framework, it is asserted that nursing challenges, both current and future, can be effectively addressed through interactive and collaborative approaches between nurses and patients [5]. This post-humanist perspective significantly impacts health performance, particularly in nursing and rehabilitation nursing, emphasizing the advancement of nursing care [6, 7]. Recognition of human and non-human relationships becomes imperative in nursing, considering the continuous progression of science and technology [8]. The rapid advancements in science and technology have introduced the capability for individuals to select desirable traits for their offspring through genetic manipulation and consider artificial organs for various medical conditions [3]. Consequently, nursing in the post-humanist era necessitates an adaptation to living in harmony with the growth and development of artificial intelligence [9]. Nurses are called upon to contribute to societal empowerment aligned with emerging technologies [10]. In the era of posthumanism, nurses assume a crucial role characterized by effective interaction, understanding of prevailing conditions, and the application of critical thinking and creativity in nursing care. Traditional solutions may prove inadequate in addressing novel conditions and situations, emphasizing the need for nurses to make informed decisions based on evidence-based decision-making [3]. Therefore, an essential requirement is nursing education that emphasizes evidence-based decision-making and the cultivation of critical thinking skills.

Coarticulation: Mutual Transformation in Human and Nonhuman Relations

Abstract: “Representation” and “articulation” are important terms in discussions of multispecies relations. In this article, I propose the term “coarticulation” that describes a process of mutual intelligibility between a human and a nonhuman and of rendering each other capable in new ways. This article argues that the concept of “coarticulation” offers a way to enrich our understanding of our human-nonhuman relations and give ontological consistency to various types of nonhumans that matter to us. It traces the reciprocal imprints that nonhumans and humans make on each other. Not least, it provides an alternative way to think about politics with nonhumans: a politics of cohabitation.

Think with the virus

This essay proposes that analyses of the pandemic caused by Covid-19 can be clarified by reflections from the field of anthropology over recent decades regarding the plural effects of the interaction between human and non-human animals. These human–nonhuman relationships are intimate and unpredictable; between entities whose agency and modes of existence are not always precisely identifiable. Our contention is that ‘more than human’ perspective, as a relational marker, expresses a counterpoint defined by interspecific alterities that we humans establish with certain animal species. Furthermore, these relationships are configured as a ‘category-metaphor’ enabling us to perceive the multiple and complex ways in which we compose our lives in relation to the ‘nature’ of everything around us. We argue that events such as the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 have a reflective potential that can draw the attention of those who do Animal Studies to these relations. We highlight the limiting effects of a narrowly defined (‘absolutely animal’) disciplinary rhetoric, when instead we need to formulate meaningful responses to the consequences of our relationships with other beings. We address the valorization of relations between humans and non-humans in their vital contexts; that is, what is necessary and available to survive. They consider the access and utilization of available resources, and how they are unequal around the world. Our anthropological perspective asks what it means to simultaneously address issues of power and marginality in the face of capitalism and globalization, to consider humans and non-humans as companion species, and to take the benefits offered by anthropology learned from the lived world, without separating it from politics and history.

Reading the Mermaid Sisters of Smoczyńska’s (2015) “The Lure” as More Than Shoreline Strangers: Toward a Feminist Solidarity with Nonhuman Others

The monstrous mermaid sisters of Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s musical horror film, The Lure (2015), mysteriously appear along the Polish shoreline and threaten to cannibalize men. Although unusual in the horror genre, Smoczyńska’s combination of musical numbers and aquatic gothic monsters strategically appropriates elements of mermaid mythology to create a contemporary story of bodily performativity and sisterhood. Following a critical consideration of the literary and cultural histories associated with the mermaid, this article presents a textual analysis of The Lure and related paratexts (director interviews, industry expert reviews, scholarly criticism). From one analytic reading perspective, The Lure’s can be read as a coming of age story that implies that bodily transformations interrupt the solidarity of sisterhood. This reading illuminates differential associations with feminism and women’s agency that are particularly poignant in the context of the Polish Solidarity movement. Extending this feminist reading position, I develop a counter-reading that attends to the nonhuman relations between the film’s sisters and examines how processes of human exclusion and exploitation are responsible for fracturing the sisterhood. From this perspective, I read the conclusion as a call for a feminist solidarity predicated on nonhuman relations of mutuality, codependency, and symbiosis.

Policy Mobilities, Infrastructures, and Nonhuman Political Agency

Policy mobilities research has explored how policies—particularly urban development policies—spread among sites around the world, mutate along the way, and take hold in distinct contexts. Within the policy mobilities literature, there is particular attention to circulatory infrastructures, which facilitate encounters, learning, and exchange of knowledge that support the (re)production and movement of policies and “best practices.” Policy mobilities scholarship thus understands policy implementation as emerging from relational assemblages of myriad actors and social processes. Drawing on assemblage theory, this work has been attentive to nonhuman objects and infrastructures, nonetheless it has given little attention to nonhuman life. This article draws on more-than-human geographies, particularly emerging work on nonhuman life and infrastructures, to incorporate nonhuman actors into an understanding of policy mobilization. We present a case study of suburban wildlife management programs in Massachusetts and discuss how human–nonhuman relationships undergird policy development, transfer, and change. Drawing insights from municipal surveys, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, we argue that nonhumans are active in the production of policy assemblages and the mobility of environmental policies. Deer, in particular, are lively actors entangled in the circulation of policies designed to manage social-ecological dynamics and processes that also include ticks, forests, bacteria, and many other nonhuman agents. Through this intervention to situate nonhuman life in policy mobilities, we highlight the political agency of nonhuman actors, the materialities of policy mobilization, and the role of nonhumans in shaping relational networks.

The Birth of Hirudiculture: Parisian Medicine, Leech Farming and the Transformation of Marshland in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis , the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health.

Storying with Homelands

Pastoralists who live in the Tyva Republic approach their home landscapes as sentient and engage with them through a reciprocal relationship. The sociality of landscapes builds upon a multigenerational belonging amongst Tyva kinship groups with their homelands. In this study, I explore how community-homeland belonging allows for a more-than-human practice of engaging with the past—storying with homelands. I draw on a case study, which involves the construction of a Buddhist stupa by the Soyan kinship group at a site named Chylgy-Dash in 2019. I suggest that the community’s storying with an endangered landscape aims, first, to bridge with the past across socialist decades when the state neglected human–nonhuman relationships, and, second, to enact and to story-into-being community-homeland belonging. Keywords: Indigenous historicities, more-than-human storytelling, memory politics, post-socialism, community-homeland belonging

An Ecocritical Perspective of Flora and Fauna under the 2003 Invasion of Iraq in American and Iraqi novels

Abstract This essay offers ecocritical discussions of Iraqi flora and fauna under the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the point of view of both American and Iraqi novelists. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the American Kevin Powers’s in The Yellow Birds (2012) and Iraqi Sinan Antoon's in The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) extend their moral mission of the 2003 invasion of Iraq which moves beyond the human species to include flora and fauna in light of ecocriticism. More specifically, the paper attempts to expose the outrageous things reflected by Antoon and Powers that the US invasion has done to flora and fauna which are officially ignored. It also examines the proper employment of different forms of symbolism and techniques to strengthen their ecological conservation values. The study concludes that despite the selected writers’ different experiences of colonialism, they similarly stand in creating eco-consciousness that comes from their understanding that the costs of war are not only measured by the loss of humans, but also by the devastation of flora and fauna to institutionalize a strong oppositional stance towards the war in Iraq. Key words : Ecocriticism , Biocentric Vsion , Eco-justice Perspective , Environmental Ethics , Human and Nonhuman Relationship , Los of Biodiversity , Sustainability .

Retrofitting the Mekong: Community-based environmental responses to Chinese transnational infrastructure in a Thai border town

For decades, the Mekong River has been a site of ongoing tensions between China-backed infrastructure and communities relying on the mighty Mekong for their lives and livelihoods. In Thailand, tensions have escalated into actions against ecologically damaging hydropower dam development and the blasting of river rapids for Chinese navigation in a Thai border town. This article examines how Chinese transnational infrastructure has been reconfiguring power relationships among actors at multiple scales. Based on my fieldwork, I offer a narrative of the concerted efforts by one small community-based environmental group in northern Thailand, some of whose activism has prodded Chinese planners and project managers into responding to widespread criticism of ecological damage caused by its hydropower and riparian infrastructure and ignoring the needs of downstream local communities. The interactions between Chinese agencies and local NGOs will be discussed through the concept of a moral ecology of infrastructure, which contributes to transcending infrastructure and the environment, enabling a broadened understanding of human and nonhuman relations in more recent retrofitting of the dams and waterway projects. I argue that the reconfigured ‘Green’ Belt and Road Initiative is a contingent process in which multiple transnational actors claim decision-making power over the retrofitting and redevelopment of the Mekong's ecological infrastructure.

Plural relational green space values for whom, when, and where? – A social media approach

The values people ascribe to their interactions with and within the environment are essential to inform justice and sustainability transformations. The development of many of these values unfolds through enjoying so-called cultural ecosystem services (CES) such as outdoor recreation, landscape aesthetics or environmental education. A growing body of literature is improving the assessment of the multiple ways that people value human and non-human relations arising when enjoying CES. Yet, the geo-temporal-demographic patterns of values distribution and the lessons that can be derived are to be consistently analysed within this relational framework. Building on a visual and textual content analysis of social media (SM) data geotagged in a peri-urban park of Barcelona, Spain, this research explores the potential of analysing the associated metadata (such as geotag, timestamp and social media users' demographics – i.e., performed gender and residency) in order to develop a better understanding of the linkages between people's values and the situated context of their construction. Our results show trends in relational CES values distribution along and between the analysed spatial, temporal, and demographic dimensions. In particular, despite there being a multiplicity of values revealed across the whole case-study area, to enjoy contemplative CES, such as spiritual or cognitive value, people need to move away from highly frequented areas and prefer specific times of the day, respectively evening or afternoon. Locals show a higher preference to visit the park on weekends compared to non-locals, while women-performing users show a significantly higher drop in their CES benefits uptake compared to men-performing users at night. In addition to providing novel and fine-grained information for transformative practices toward justice and sustainability, this study highlights the importance of complementing CES studies employing SM with metadata analysis to improve our understanding of the relationship between the real and the more-than-real.