Posthuman Ecologies Research Articles

Ecology of the ‘Other’: A Posthumanist Study of Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014)

In Posthuman Ecology, anthropocentrism, based on the binary division between the privileged human and the ‘other’, gets deconstructed, leading to an acknowledgment of humans as essentially tangled in an intricate web of the natural world. In such ecologies, boundaries between the human and the more-than-human (non-human) worlds become porous, creating fluid identities and conditions of being within a framework of active interplay between the human and the non-human world. The ecology of folktales is replete with Posthumanism, as their narratives consistently break the unbridgeable gap between the human, non-human, and the spiritual and/or supernatural worlds and present certain non-naturalist ontologies that are mostly at odds with naturalism or modern empirical science. Such tales provided much-needed templates for sustainable development in the time of the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to study Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014) as a posthumanist narrative where Vilie (a hunter) goes on a fantastical journey to find a fabled magical stone from the bottom of the ‘sleeping river’. Vilie’s journey comes out as a playground for both mundane and fantastic elements. He grows as a human being, and this happens as he transacts with the non-human and the supernatural world and comes across deep metaphysical questions and presents keys to understanding balance-in-transcendence.

Eco-cognitive ageing: Post-human ecologies as enhancement technologies

Eco-cognitive ageing: Post-human ecologies as enhancement technologies

Posthuman Ecology and Immersive Materiality in M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud

Posthuman Ecology and Immersive Materiality in M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud

Shifting scales, inventive intermediations: posthuman ecologies in contemporary poetry

ABSTRACT This essay describes and investigates representations and figurations of ‘posthuman ecologies’ in contemporary poetry, i.e., how non-human agencies and materialities are evoked and explored in poetic writing, and how this is accompanied by a problematisation of anthropocentrism and certain strands of humanism. Specific attention is paid to shifts in scale and ‘intermediations’ between, for instance, bacteria and humans. The emergence and analysis of such ecologies are connected to a history of ‘cyberneticization’ and ‘ecologization’ manifested both in digital media, techno- and bio-capitalism, and in a rejuvenation of the concept of ecology in contemporary thinking. In this essay, these issues are discussed in relation to three recent poetic works by Adam Dickinson, J. R. Carpenter, and Nasser Hussain. While affirming a new historical situation shaped by computational technologies and cultures of control, this poetry also challenges this situation – and invites alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world – through a playful critique partly influenced by ideas, forms, and operations from an avant-garde tradition in literature and art.

A posthuman ecology of simulated human patients: Eidolons, empathy and fidelity in the uncanny embodiment of nursing practice

Abstract The reproduction of the human form has been a universal practice amongst human ecologies for millennia. Over the past 200 years, popular culture has considered the imaginary consequences of the danger to humanity and human-ness of replicating the autonomous human form too faithfully. Today, the seductive allure of technologically advanced simulated human bodies and advances in robotics and artificial intelligence has brought us closer to facing this possibility. Alongside the simultaneous aversion and fascination of the possibility that autonomous simulated human forms may become indistinguishable from human beings is the deep-rooted uncanniness of the automaton in its strange familiarity – not only to ourselves but to our pleasant childhood imaginings of playing with dolls. As such, simulated human bodies are often enrolled in medical and nursing education models with the assumption that making the simulation teaching spaces seem as close to clinical spaces as possible will allow students to practise potentially harmful clinical skills without causing any harm to human patients. However similar the simulated human bodies may appear to a living, breathing human, a tension between the embodiment of particularly human attributes and their replication persists. How can computerized human patient simulators be enrolled to teach people to develop the necessary attributes of compassion and empathy when caring for human beings? This article explores the uncanny ecologies of simulated human patients in nursing education by presenting a posthuman analysis of the practices of nurse educators as they enrol these digital objects in their teaching. Guided by a selection of heuristics offered as a mode of interviewing digital objects, the analysis enrolled ‘Gathering Anecdotes’ and ‘Unravelling Translations’ to attune to the ways in which these uncanny posthuman assemblages become powerful modes of knowing to mobilize learning about human attributes within uncanny posthuman ecologies.

New Empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking With Speculative Fiction About Science and Social Inquiry

Interest in new empiricisms and transdisciplinary methods has led many social inquirers to engage with 20th-century post-classical physical science. Many of these projects have focused on alternative matter–mind mixtures and in/organic variation, concerned that past theories of sociality have dismissed the vibrancy and animacy of the nonhuman material world. This paper explores the power of speculative fiction to help us rethink empiricism in posthuman ecologies of the Anthropocene, in the midst of post-truth conditions and growing science denialism. We foreground speculative fiction as a way to open up scientific imaginaries, rethinking the relationship between nature, technics, and human “sense” making. We show how such texts offer alternative images of research methods for studying pluralist ecologies and new forms of worldly belonging.

Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall

Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall

Water/watery/watering: Concepts for Theorising in Environmental Education

AbstractThe assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the article develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007, 2012, 2015) concepts of lines, knots, and knotting. For this article and for the Special Issue in which it is housed, the concepts of such knottings are defined as an assemblage of haecceities, lived events that are looped, tethered and entangled as material and conceptual agencies that inhere within situated encounters. Thus, this article grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall as they have done in this work. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The article explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

The swarm that we already are: artificially intelligent (AI) swarming ‘insect drones’, targeting and international humanitarian law in a posthuman ecology

Over the last fifty-odd years the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has launched programs aiming at emulating and incorporating insect technologies in military technology. The US Army Unmanned Aircrafts Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 has specified insect swarming as a field of development for Unmanned Aviation Systems. While legal scholarship has paid substantial attention to drones, autonomous weapons systems and artificial intelligence (AI), developments based on insect swarming technologies have been largely ignored. This article takes emerging AI swarming technologies in military warfare systems as its starting point and asks about the significance of the swarming insect in and through contemporary International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and warfare. Taking up Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notions of ‘the swarm’ and the ‘war machine’, and drawing on critical environmental legal scholarship, the article argues that rather than dispersing the human from its central position in the ‘targeting loop’, the increased interest in insects for commercial and warfare purposes is an intensification of transhumanist desires and an acceleration of late capitalism. As a counter-move, and as a contribution to a posthumanist turn in IHL, the article calls for becoming-insect, swarm and minoritarian as an epistemological practice and ontological shift in IHL and its critical scholarship, resulting in a posthumanitarian legal ordering of becoming.

Why trust science in a trickster world of absolute contingency? The speculative force of mathematical abstraction

This paper explores how new materialisms and a new climatic regime complicate the nature of science under post-truth conditions. My focus is on the limits of relationality, while pursuing a fruitful and promiscuous speculation. I venture into this topic by exploring the power of speculative fiction to help us imagine and re-craft a ‘science’ adequate to pluralistic posthuman ecologies.

The Stuplime Loops of Becoming-Slug: A Prosthetic Intervention in Orientalist Animality

The Stuplime Loops of Becoming-Slug: A Prosthetic Intervention in Orientalist Animality

Science and Human Animality in Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein

Science and Human Animality in Mary Shelley’s<i>Frankenstein</i>

Appupen’s Posthuman Gothic: The Snake and the Lotus

Appupen’s The Snake and the Lotus is a dystopic work that instantiates, the essay argues, a posthuman Gothic. The horror of this version of the Gothic is inaugurated by a collapsed world, and is Appupen’s first move. This environmental theme in the text, cast as an ecological Gothic, examines the transformation of the city into a monstrous structure. The second part of the essay turns to the reconfigurations of the human form and a monstrous sexuality. In the third section I argue that Appupen’s vision of this dystopia concludes with critical posthuman ecology, marked by coexistence and mutual dependence.

Nothingness as Scaffolding for Being: Gandhi, Madeline Slade, Architecture and the Humanisation of Sacrifice's Massive Ecological Existence, Segaon, 1936–37

ABSTRACTThis essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological thought. Unlike ecologists, who think through the human and then reach for a wider post-human ecology, in the 1930s, Gandhi journeyed in the reverse order, arriving at an emphasis on human withdrawal into nothingness after initially thinking through the withdrawal into nothingness of an infinitely extended, non-human, celestial being. The essay explores Gandhi's emerging anthropocentric conception of the piety of nothingness in the context of a household plan designed for him in 1936–37 by Madeline Slade, in the village of Segaon in Maharashtra. The essay draws out the architectural and political entailments of Gandhi's anthropocentrism and his emphasis on varnashramadharma.

Biopower Below and Before the Individual

Review Article| October 01 2016 Biopower Below and Before the Individual Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Preciado, Paul B., translated by Benderson, Bruce. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. x + 427 pp.The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. Lee, Rachel C.. New York: New York University Press, 2014. vi + 325 pp.Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. New York: New York University Press, 2012. xiv + 276 pp. Kyla Schuller Kyla Schuller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2016) 22 (4): 629–636. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3603126 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kyla Schuller; Biopower Below and Before the Individual. GLQ 1 October 2016; 22 (4): 629–636. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3603126 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Duke University Press2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Humanities Review You do not currently have access to this content.

Review of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Review of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (review)

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (review)

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (review)

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (review)

Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies Vernadette Gonzalez, Chair, Tony Tiongson, and Tamara Ho Rachel Lee’s The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New York University Press, 2014) is a book that returns us to biology, challenging and enriching the very foundations of Asian American cultural and literary critique and its premise that the category of Asian America is a social construction. Instead of being reactionary and essentialist, Lee’s ambitious assembling of technoscientific and humanistic approaches allows for a serious consideration of the most timely and urgent questions that we face in the age of global capital’s optimization of certain lives over others. Beginning with a seemingly straightforward question about Asian American artists’ obsession with body parts, Lee’s capacious exploration of human (and other) life presents the biological as paradoxically central to Asian American cultural studies’ move toward a subjectless theory while noting how the biological (through the ethics of disability, cross-species interpenetration, multiscalar ecologies) operates through familiar matrices of power that could be characterized as Asiatic. In other words, Lee takes the body—in its broadest, most generous definition—seriously in order to consider the posthuman (or the extra- or interhuman) and the kinds of emergent imaginations, materialities, and futures we must look to for an ethical Asian American critique. Lee innovatively brings traditions of Asian American cultural critique into conversation with performance studies, and feminist and queer (or “femiqueer,” to use her phrasing) scholarship in medical humanities to produce a truly interdisciplinary work that will have a profound impact on the field. Her book is a sustained meditation on and extension of theories of biopolitics and biosociality and their organizing violence while also an impressive model for how Asian American studies as a field can uniquely inflect and should engage with new technologies, science studies, and what Donna Haraway has dubbed “naturcultures.” Presenting plasticized human flesh, teeth, peristaltic and vaginal functions, chimeric ecologies, mental disability, and illness in Asian American cultural productions, Lee deftly parses out how a more profound and expansive understanding of biology can provide a dynamic rereading of family formation and theories of race and governmentality. Her nuanced close readings of an eclectic archive (literature, performance, stand-up comedy) illuminate how the body or the bios in its manifold forms are central to how social life is governed and vice versa. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America offers a more complex understanding of power and an ethics of agency that is at once paradigm-shifting, generative, and hopeful. [End Page 425] Vernadette Gonzalez, Chair University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Tony Tiongson University of New Mexico Tamara Ho University of California, Riverside Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

The exquisite corpse of Asian America: biopolitics, biosociality, and posthuman ecologies

The exquisite corpse of Asian America: biopolitics, biosociality, and posthuman ecologies