Posthuman Research Articles

El cuerpo como distopía: un análisis poshumano de la obra de Nee Barros

Posthumanism is a barely explored avenue of research in Galician Studies, despite the growing number of literary works published in recent years that illustrate the increasing social debates that have flourished in the last few decades and which are directly connected to this line of thought. Issues related to abject citizenship, figures of exclusion, disposable subjects, among others, appear in works by contemporary authors in the Galician language such as Nee Barros, a transversal and multidisciplinary author who, in recent years, has published an interesting corpus of analysis. This article aims to focus on three of their first works, 19 poemas para um VÍRUS-19 (2020), Identidade (2021) and Nom estamos quebrades (2023). The subjectivity of the human body is the central theme that unites this collection of poems, a play and a novel, respectively; texts that illustrate Barros’s particular sense of transgender lyricism, which questions gender performance as ‘normative’. Posthuman theory will serve in this particular case to explore the way in which Barros interrogates human corporality and the constant scrutiny of non-binary bodies and/or sexualities in the, sometimes, dystopian reality inhabited by subjects who go beyond the limitation imposed by the humanistic male/female gender dichotomy.

Early childhood memories of animals: reflections and considerations in relation to posthuman education

ABSTRACT This study focuses on literary arts education, especially childhood memories of pets and other more-than-humans. Memory writings were collected as data using the Pritney method among students in early childhood teacher education. The written memories were analysed through the lens of bibliotherapy. Practices with reflections provide also perspectives on posthumanities and offer a sense of wellbeing. Bibliotherapy approach and posthuman theory allow exploring our position as humans and more-than-humans in the educational system. Students (n = 200) are recalling their primary memories related to animal/pet contacts, toys, play, and characters in literature. Memories through close readings illuminate how the animal theme and bibliotherapy approach are employed in this project. Students may develop an awareness of the value of animal geographies and literary arts in education, thus moving towards posthuman education and fostering different ways of caring and wellbeing, ethics, and education that also encompass more-than-humans.

Joyful encounters: Dance, touch, and embodied ethics in times of COVID‐19

AbstractThis article explores the practice of Contact Improvisation during the COVID‐19 pandemic, focusing on how dance serves as a means of repair. Drawing on Erin Manning's posthumanist philosophy, woven into both the theoretical and embodied practice of dance, it envisions touch as a social‐relational bond capable of opening pathways to affective intensities, particularly the experience of joy. Employing and experimenting with affective ethnography, I explore the ethico‐political aspects of touch, extending ongoing discussions of ethics as deeply embodied. Specifically, I show how this exploration could lead to theorizing an “embodied ethic of repair”, enabling future‐oriented response‐ability and reclaiming joy as an affective force for navigating forthcoming bio‐political, social, and environmental challenges in and for organizations.

Psychology, the posts, and qualitative research

ABSTRACT In this article, we consider the debates in the field of psychology about the “posts” around two broad issues—that of “incommensurability” between qualitative research and post-qualitative inquiry, and tensions regarding method and methodology. We are largely in agreement that these systems of thought are so fundamentally different that they cannot be reconciled, as they arise from differing ontological and epistemological foundations of qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry, but we offer some clarifications regarding our views. In relation to methods and methodology, we provide some examples of different conceptions of methods and methodology, primarily by examining writers who are sympathetic to critical posthumanism. While in some cases, methods and methodology are eschewed, in other cases, methods but not methodology are eschewed, while yet in others, a focus on the research process is what produces the knowledge. The paper concludes by considering the contributions that psychology has offered posthumanism.

The ‘ordinary’ violence of national fantasy: otherwise, ‘out of time’ political imaginaries for posthuman literacies and book banning

ABSTRACT In this paper, I ask: How can thinking with posthuman theories of affect in gender and education enable us to trouble current book banning efforts that work to reassert the gender order, namely by aligning heterosexuality with the notion of a ‘core national culture’? And how do post↔feminisms, as more-than-human political practices of knowing/being/doing/feeling/sounding, help us to embrace otherwise imaginaries for ‘literate-techno-bodies’? I begin from the premise that, as the im/material-discursive forces of white supremacist hyper-capitalist cisheteropatriarchy have historically shaped US aesthetic practices and notions of Americanness, gender and hetero-sexuality affectively extend into and entangle with texts, particularly fairytales. My hope is to redirect affective energies to otherwise worlds where gender, sexuality, and literacies are no longer bound to a stabilizing heteropatriarchal metanarrative that violently moves via subtle and not-so-subtle relational networks, including book censorship, state/federal care, parental protesting, and even happily ever after.

Figuring Femme

Abstract Approaching femme as a figuration, a political fiction that merges critique of the here-and-now with an ethics of affirmation, driven by desires for an elsewhere/otherwise, the article engages in an experimental – autophenomenographic, poetic, and philosophical – figuring process. The aim is to foreground critical-affirmative potentials of femme and femme-inism in queer and posthumanist perspectives. Starting from a poem that spells out the author’s process of becoming-femme, the article establishes a conversation between the poem’s personal framing and theoretical interventions, selected from archives of critical posthumanist, queer, philosophy in the feminine, transgender and femme theory. The figuring process is based on a vignette methodology. Each of the poem’s stanzas give rise to a vignette, linking the poetic images with resonating theory fragments stitched together to an assemblage. Rather than as an attempt to synthesize a seamlessly interwoven theorization of femme, the figuring process is a meditation on the assembling of unruly fragments.

Differing Eco-Phenomenological Discourses in Amitav Ghosh's Ecological Realism and Timothy Morton's Dark Ecology

This paper explores the contrasting yet complementary eco-phenomenological discourses in Amitav Ghosh’s ecological realism and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology. Both thinkers offer crucial insights into the Anthropocene, but they do so from different perspectives. Ghosh, through his historical materialist framework, focuses on the socio-political, historical, and colonial forces driving the current ecological crises. His ecological realism reflects the entanglement of human and non-human histories and advocates for a literary realism that incorporates the agency of nature. Morton, on the other hand, embraces post-humanist philosophies, specifically object-oriented ontology, to develop his concept of "dark ecology"—a framework that highlights the inherent strangeness, ambiguity, and uncanniness of the natural world. Morton introduces the notion of hyperobjects, entities like climate change that are too vast and complex to be fully comprehended by humans. This paper argues that despite their differences, both Ghosh and Morton challenge anthropocentric thinking and offer radical reconfigurations of humanity's relationship with the natural world. By placing their theories in dialogue, this paper underscores the importance of embracing both historical materialist and ontological perspectives to address the ecological challenges of the Anthropocene.

Decolonizing Forest: The Myth of Panjurli and Guliga in Kantara (2022)

Colonial ideologies reduce nature to a repository of extractable resources and portray the Indigenous communities’ religious understanding of nature as primitive and unscientific. Decolonization foregrounds the silenced Indigenous epistemes that critique exceptional human paradigms of colonial modernity. This paper examines how traditional religious rituals function as a method of decolonization and discusses their exclusion from Western academia. It focuses on Kantara’s cinematic representation of the Indigenous ritual of Bhoota Kola and the worship of forest deities, Panjurli and Guliga, in the coastal areas of southern Karnataka and Kerala. These rituals emphasize the agency of the environment, where the forest, humans, and deities are porous and permeable. This non-anthropocentric understanding of humans questions the dominance of the secular narratives of posthuman theories in Western academia. Rituals foster ecological behaviours and highlight multispecies relationality, providing alternatives for sustainable futures. In emphasizing Indigenous religious practices, the paper undisciplines the Eurocentric study of religion and questions the disciplinary boundaries between scientific thought and Indigenous knowledge. Thus, this paper argues for the inclusion of regional cinemas from the Global South in Western academia to foreground Indigenous epistemes that undiscipline the study of religion and science.

Kinship questions

Kinship, diverse webs of relationship generated by people in their social practice, has long been analysed and debated by anthropologists, from an earlier dominance of lineage theory to the current, much more fluid emphasis on relatedness. Since the days of processualism, archaeologists have given more attention to kinship than in the early years of the discipline, but in rather limited and general ways until very recently. With the advent of successful aDNA investigations, and with some prompt from posthumanist theory, that interest has been renewed recently. I discuss some inconsistencies between the accounts of kinship by anthropologists and archaeologists, notably the emphasis by the former on diversity, relatedness, the possibilities and implications of bilateral descent, and the uncertain relationship between biology and kinship. To begin to investigate how this might all work out in archaeology, I sketch three scenarios from successive parts of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland, across the fourth to third millennia cal BC, attempting specific rather than generalised models and indicating the outlines of a possible trajectory through time.

The Female Body and the Environment: A Transnational Study of Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera

The female body is often depicted in parallel with the environment in many literary works. This article examines how the female body can prompt a rethinking of the environment by analyzing three literary works, Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, published in 1996 Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, published in 1994-1995, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, published in 1985, which root in Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American cultures, respectively. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the female body parallels the environment by displaying non-human characteristics and relating to natural elements in these three works; on the other hand, it deconstructs the boundary between the environment and humans by playing a crucial role in constructing human identity. This paper draws on theories of posthumanism, material feminism, and ecofeminism to explore the depiction of the female body and its role in rethinking the environment. The cultural hybridity of local and non-local worldviews—a key reason for situating this study within a transnational comparative framework—serves as a crucial element in demonstrating how the female body bridges the environment and human identity across all three works. This analysis aims to deconstruct the anthropocentric perspective on the environment, thereby rethinking the role of the female body in this context.

Ecogothic Interpretations of the Anthropocene

The so-called nonhuman turn has a great role to play in theoretical elaborations of the Anthropocene. This broad tendency of thought incorporates contemporary non-anthropocentric schools of thought such as Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and posthumanism. These various sociological and philosophical directions have one thing in common: the rejection and transcendence of anthropocentrism, as well as a new sensitivity to the heterogeneous, irreducible and multiple nature of reality. Openness to post-anthropocentrism is a general characteristic of authors who work in Anthropocene theory today. However, posthumanist philosophy, while it decenters and deconstructs the human, is also committed to an aesthetic of uncertainty, fear, and even horror. Simon C. Estok, in his highly important article “Theorising the EcoGothic,” shows that during the ecological crisis philosophical thought must traverse unknown terrain, while also emphasizing the darker aspects of sociocultural constructs. Posthumanism must, by its very nature, prepare for the unthinkable in a quite literal sense according to Stefan Herbrechter. The Anthropocene constitutes an opening to what Nick Land calls “Outsideness”. A future condition “after” the human can be understood as a condition that opens onto a dark, monstrous, threatening or, in a word, hybrid future beyond any anthropic measure.

What is the machine? Teachers’ professional learning about generative artificial intelligence as tutors for children

ABSTRACT With the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI (GenAI) to school settings, teachers are likely to be drawn into professional learning scenarios where they will be expected to learn how to use programs and applications for remediation and tutoring of children. Previous research highlights how professional learning for teachers about GenAI has been focused on gaining their acquiescence to using GenAI by arguing that it is both superior and inescapable. This critical posthuman work uses a professional learning scenario to ask questions about the historically present challenges of asking teachers to use GenAI as a universal good when this discourse has been used to colonise and imperialise in schools, particularly with technologies. Our critical posthuman diffractive reading revealed alternative encounters that teachers and students could have with GenAI and reasonable pathways for avoiding it. Implications of this work include a need to draw on the diffractive encounters presented here to understand and address who and what the machine is when it comes to adopting advanced technologies for various purposes in schools.

Metropolitan metamorphosis: posthuman transformations in the urbanised world of ‘Good Hunting’

ABSTRACT The present paper takes a critical posthumanist lens to study the consequences of rapid urbanisation of the Chinese landscape as presented in the short story ‘Good Hunting’, by Ken Liu. One of the main characters in the story is Yan, a huli jing (fox-spirit), whose ability to switch between her fox and human forms is severely impaired by the loss of remnant nature in China, and the subsequent erosion of the qi from the soil. It is not just the natural landscape that undergoes a transformation during urbanisation – the remnants of nature do not remain untouched by this process. Beings like Yan, who continue to inhabit the place that used to be their home, do not remain the same that they were pre-urbanisation. The city changes them, moulds them in ways hitherto inconceivable, and they undergo this transmogrification of their bodies and their self in order to survive. The article draws out the historical relationship between urban spaces and (post)human bodies, with a specific focus on the Chinese body, drawing parallels between the ideals associated with the city and juxtaposing them with what it means to be posthuman. The paper also interrogates Yan’s status as a liminal entity before and after Hong Kong’s transformation, and her use of liminality as a survival strategy.

The Non-Anthropocentric Other in Film: Towards a Spectral Ethics of Film

This article aims to add a further perspective to the discussion of the relationship between film and ethics. This perspective is important in today’s context, as the omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual images in everyday life increasingly determines our thinking and behaviour. However, there is a lack of appropriate critical reflection and ethical understanding of these images and their ontology. This article proposes a machine ethics of film from a film-philosophical perspective. Such an ethics draws on critical posthumanism, namely on Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering”, which explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. Thereby, special attention is given to the ontological nexus of film and death, as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed along with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from the author’s earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy and certain Heidegger-based arguments set out in earlier writings about film and death, this article introduces the figure of what is called the “machinic spectre of film”. From here, the outline of a possible spectral ethics of film is considered by giving reasons for the exploration of further questions.

Introduction: ‘Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture’

The theories and notions around the posthuman have become, in recent years, a key framework to approach contemporary culture and its products. Inspired by the growing cross-disciplinarity in the field of critical posthumanism, as well as by the increased prevalence of posthumanist ideas in North American literature and culture, this Special Issue seeks to map some recent trends regarding the understanding of the posthuman at two different levels: in terms of critical approach and regarding the types of texts explored. Thus, the articles included in this Special Issue resort to the critical tools provided by critical posthumanism, trauma studies, new materialism, transhumanism and digital anthropology, bringing to the fore not just the outstanding critical currency of these disciplines by themselves and their usefulness to approach contemporary artistic products, but also the points of convergence and divergence among them. Apart from their emphasis on cross-disciplinarity, the articles that make up this Special Issue explore a wide breath of cultural products, giving readers a glimpse into the current relevance of posthumanist ideas in the North American literary and cultural scene. At the same time, the contributions in this Special Issue map recent aesthetic and narratological approaches to the posthuman, the non-human and the more-than-human world, pointing to posthumanism as a constantly evolving field. Overall, the articles bring together the most recent scholarship within the fast-changing field of critical posthumanism and explore different twenty-first-century understandings of the posthuman subject at a time when the task of (re)defining what it means to be human is perhaps more pressing than ever.

Ethico-onto-epistem-ology and traumatic memories in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Sorrowland

Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and her notion of ethico-onto-epistemology, based on the inseparability of ethics, being and knowledge, disclaim any immanent distinction between the human and the nonhuman, the mind and the body, and discourse and matter. The approach to reality as discursively-materially constituted brings together critical posthumanism, agential realism and new materialism, which comprise Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and Barad’s ethics of knowing – in line with their respective ethics of becoming and ethics of entanglement. Bearing these premises in mind, this article presents an analysis of trans-species, trans-corporeal ethico-onto-epistem-ology in Rivers Solomon’s latest Afrofuturist works, The Deep (2019) and Sorrowland (2021) as the posthumanist means that enable characters to cope with their ancestors’ traumatic memories. The Deep portrays the wajinru as a new species emerging from the entangled intra-action of relata (the unborn children of pregnant Black women thrown overboard slave ships) and their medium (the ocean). Simultaneously, the history of the oppressed is presented as discursive-material and embodied in the figure of ‘the historian’, who hosts the memories of all their ancestors liberating the other wajinru from their traumatic history. In Sorrowland, with a marked posthumanist neo-materialist stance, memories adopt a quasi-gothic haunting quality but are indeed the trans-corporeal result of scientific experimentation on an African American sect for the US government’s military interests. The protagonist’s symbiosis with wild nature appears as the novel’s brand of ethical entanglement in the face of racial exploitation.

Beyond SF: Reading the posthuman in crime fiction

Science fiction (SF)’s capacity to imagine alternative futures, embodiments and forms of agency is a crucial resource for the ethical project of critical posthumanism. In the twenty-first century, however, science-fictionality has surpassed its traditional generic boundaries to become a tool for comprehending and intervening in our changing reality, made concrete in different media and styles. This has translated into a rise of recombinant genre fiction, whereby themes and scenarios related to technoscience are addressed by genres other than SF. One illustrative instance of this tendency is the burgeoning body of works that integrate the conventions of SF and crime fiction, which have been steadily on the rise for the past five years in anglophone literary markets. Aiming to open up new avenues for the study of this critically unexplored corpus, this article sets out to assemble a critical apparatus for examining the representation of posthumanity in these hybrid texts. Drawing from an approach to crime fiction as a vector for dialectically exploring social and ethical questions, this article will argue that the constituent elements of the genre, namely its close interrelation with technological breakthroughs, its ambivalent engagement with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism and its affinity with interrogations of the exploitative workings of neo-liberalism, make crime fiction a productive locus for challenging dominant conceptions of the posthuman, as well as for articulating alternative visions indexed to critical posthumanist thought.

‘Day-dreaming’ school climate: a slow critical feminist post-humanist c/art/ographic listening to how school feels

ABSTRACT This paper becomes a mapping of a PhEmaterialist research project, an apparatus entangled with re/making the world that applauds difference in education. Feeling-thinking-making with critical posthumanist work, we affirm that school climate matters and encourage educators’ attention to the fluxing materiality of school climate created through everyday schooling events. Daydreaming aptly accounted for our slow PhEmaterialist-inspired theoretical work, a transgressing and transversing of conventional conceptions of ‘school climate’, ‘methodology’ and ‘pedagogy’. Our school climate project emerges as an experimental mapping of eventful research, a slow research creation process where we attuned to emergent affirming pedagogical relationalities. Students worked alongside researchers over six weeks at an Australian community school, enacting research creation in the making of school climate. Da(r)ta created include voice recordings, reflective notes, written responses, photographs, narratives, soundscapes, zines, posters, drawings and maps.

Angels and Animals: Posthumanism and ‘cosmic consciousness’ in psychedelic ‘expanded’ cinema

Focusing on two ‘expanded’ films - Bruce Conner’s Looking for Mushrooms (1959-65) and Stan Brakhage’s Eye Myth (1967) - this paper stages an encounter between psychedelic ‘expanded’ cinema, the writings of Alan Watts, and the field of posthuman philosophy. Drawing special attention to the materiality of film and its relation to the experience of altered states of consciousness, this paper will critically connect the art and ideas of the Californian counter-culture in the 1960s to a wider network of transnational anti- and posthumanism. Beginning with Watts’ dualism between the ‘angel and animal’ elements of human subjectivity, this paper then considers the inherent tension between the transcendentalism of the psychedelic ‘cosmic consciousness’ and materialist posthumanism centred on ‘embodied and embedded’ experience. Whilst these areas are not usually considered alongside one another, exploring their potential resonances can help to situate Watts’ philosophy within awider genealogy of posthumanist thought, and shed light on the ways in which ‘expanded’ cinema engaged with complicated questions concerning altered experiences. Finally, by highlighting the tensions between materiality and transcendental experience at play in Conner and Brakhage’s films, this paper will demonstrate how film stages a complex intervention into debates around human and posthuman subjectivity. In doing so, this paper offers a radical and alternative perspective on both psychedelic ‘expanded’ cinema, and the intellectual history of transnational anti-humanist philosophy. 

And the Winner Is - Anthropocentrism and Speciesism: Writing a History of Animals in New Zealand’s Agricultural and Pastoral Events

The paper explores news photographs from New Zealand between 1900 and 1932 and unpacks the happenings at agricultural and pastoral events. It utilizes an archival research strategy to find the news coverage of such events that is informed by an animalcentric philosophy. As such, it engages with critical posthumanist and poststructuralist thought. This allows the presence of nonhuman animals as sentient beings to be recognized and challenges previous approaches of scholarship. Thus, the paper writes farmed nonhuman animals into the history of agricultural and pastoral events. In illustrating what occurred at these events, the paper illuminates the anthropocentric bias and speciesism-grounded principles embedded in human attitudes toward farmed nonhuman animals. Humans treat fellow sentient beings unfairly and unjustly, which is problematic when nonhuman animal sentience provides moral worth. This study contributes to studies in leisure’s ‘animal turn’ by focusing on the entanglements of human and farmed nonhuman animals in events.