Posthumanist Approach Research Articles

A Material Culture of Medieval Disability: Contextualising Norwegian Votive Offerings

In this paper, the potential for material culture studies within the history of disability is explored through a study of preserved anatomical votives from medieval Norway left in connection with miraculous healing practices. The Norwegian votives, which include wooden body parts of hands, arms, finger, feet and legs as well as mobility aids, are here related to the lived experience of the physically impaired. Anatomical votives have been interpreted as meaningful depictions of how an individual conceptualised the body part in question, which they sought healing for. Through a posthumanist approach, anatomical votives can, however, not only be seen as solely representational of a body part but as material extensions of the body. Preserved mobility aids, here identified as hand-trestles and a knee-brace, provide insight into the availability of aids for individuals with lower limb impairments in the medieval North. The study of the material culture of disability can elucidate cultural notions of disability in relation to physical impairment. While written miracle accounts have been identified as important sources for the study of medieval disability, their associated material culture is here presented as important data for the embodied experience of the physically impaired in medieval Norway.

The religious materiality of the world in the novel The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

The article discusses the novel The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen’s applying elements of selected posthumanist theories, mainly object-oriented ontology (G. Harman, T. Morton) and new materialism (J. Bennett). It considers the assumption that in the novel, the ontological status of human beings as well as material objects is fluid, as both play the role of a prop and the entity manipulating the prop. The author focuses on the main character’s religious cognitive perspective and her relations with her (im)material surroundings. An attempt is made to point out certain similarities between the religious worldview and the posthumanist approach. To this end, the author discusses several issues related to the dualistic categories of material vs. immaterial, rational vs. irrational, as well as human vs. non-human.

Memorializing the unspectacular: Toward a minor remembrance

This essay explores the difficulties faced by the field of memory studies to adequately address unspectacular violence. While a majority of mnemonic strategies focus on events of spectacular disasters, outrageous atrocities, extreme occurrences, and massive sufferings contained in time and space, the damages generated by unspectacular operations of slow, latent, and silent violence remain difficult to recognize within the memorial landscape. Building on the concept of slow violence, as well as on posthumanist approaches to violent legacies of colonialism, and in the context of the current shift within memory studies toward a planetary sensitivity, this essay interrogates the possibilities of doing justice to the invisibilized harm spreading across long periods of time in different parts of the world. Sketching a possible agenda for the future, the essay suggests that a critical engagement with theorizations of feminist geopoliticians, along with a turn to practices of minor remembrance, can enable a more effective linking of the unspectacular to the spectacular, ensuring the visibility of the former amid memorializing practices.

Ecological Thinking about the Metaverse from a Posthumanist Perspective

ABSTRACT The metaverse is a burgeoning technological domain, ranging from data-driven algorithms to advanced artificial intelligence. Immersive virtual reality does not reflect the ecological crisis in fictional worlds through interactivity. In the footsteps of Félix Guattari, this article elaborates on ecological thinking in three categories, each of which reflects the ecological risk and potential positive improvement of the metaverse. In the first category, environmental ecology, the article argues that the technological infrastructure of the metaverse is intensely power-consuming and materialises data and information fluxes. Moreover, the structure of digitised societies promotes intangible production. In the second category, social ecology, it argues that cognitive capitalism further stimulates consumerism because of big data classification and user-targeted algorithms and further amplifies climate change due to the empowered logistics industry. Additionally, capitalism causes continuous competence in the culture industry, leading to a high elimination rate of device production and low efficiency of intellectual labour. In the last category, mental ecology, the article argues that by precisely targeting users, the attention economy of the metaverse empowers individuals who are eager to pursue valorisation. These digital dwellers overlook ecological issues and the foundations of their virtual lives. In the posthumanist approach, humans are flattened by capitalism and become surplus value as natural forces. Humans’ minds are alienated from the idea that nature and humans coexist. Instead, the metaverse is directed toward individual power that immerses itself in a capital-driven network of information technology. This article proposes the merit of forming a nature-culture continuum to promote an ecological ideology in the metaverse. On the one hand, the nature-culture continuum of the metaverse spreads ecological knowledge and praxis via interactivity. On the other hand, the key mediation of nature-human metabolism through human labour contributes to environmentally friendly products, which cultivate an ecological culture of consumerism. Thus, the metaverse functions in a posthumanist context that consumes nature and humans for profit; however, the metaverse can also arouse thoughts of sustainability.

Mutual Doings: Exploring Affectivity in Participatory Methodologies

The aim of this paper is to explore the affective implications of working with participatory methodologies within the context of sexuality education. For this exploration, a feminist posthumanist approach is put to work, building on a relational ontology and the notions of affectivity, assemblage and environmentality. Drawing from a practice-based research project concerning sexuality education conducted together with teachers in Swedish secondary schools, the analysis puts forward how the research assemblage navigates and manages affective conditions in ways that produce, allow and exclude certain feelings. With (dis)trust, uncertainty, frustration, laughter and shame, the assemblage made bodies act and become in specific ways. Thus, the analysis shows how participatory and practice-based research become moulded by power relations and intense flows of desire working together. This raises questions about how participatory methodologies within an ontological view of interdependence afford to manage affective intensities to move in certain directions of socially just sexuality education.

Disability, Agency, and Moral Qualms

This paper explores how disability is built into the functionality of industrialized farming practices but is not discussed in disability justice discourse. By analyzing works by Sunaura Taylor, Thomas Bretz, Temple Grandin, and Cary Wolfe, I examine ways to condemn the disability-causing functions of industrialized agriculture as well as address the rift between the animal rights and disability justice community caused by Singer’s Animal Liberation without detracting from the work done by disability activists to destigmatize disability. The driving question for this article grapples with how to celebrate disability while simultaneously acknowledging that disability-causing structures like factory farming are bad. Through a posthumanist approach, this paper contends that by rejecting human exceptionalism and moving past agency as a qualifier for moral consideration, the two communities can be reconciled and ensure their rights.

Poverty metaphors: An autoethnography in three parts

This autoethnography seeks to open up for re-interpretation and debate three topics that feature within social work practice, research, and education: firstly the value and use of metaphor in understanding practice, secondly approaches to social work reflective writing, and thirdly the issue of poverty and its significance and impact in child and family social work. Metaphors can be valuable in framing understanding of issues within social work practice and advocating for change. Three metaphors have been particularly used in understanding the relationship between social work practice and poverty: The Invisibility of Poverty, The Elephant in the Room, and The Wallpaper of Practice. The three Parts of this autoethnography each adopt a different approach to autoethnographic writing and addresses and unsettles one of these metaphors. The first part adopts a narrative-reflective-analytical approach conventional to reflective writing in social work. The second and third parts adopt poetic and post-humanist approaches, respectively. It is proposed that adopting autoethnography as a methodology challenges the uncritical application of metaphor to situated practice and thereby prevents interpretive foreclosure. ‘Writing against’ objectified social work knowledge may assist in opening up practice to more challenging critical reflection and re-interpretation. Juxtaposing these three parts demonstrates the potential of non-conventional autoethnographic approaches to provide opportunities for deeper reflection on the experiences of doing social work within the context of poverty than conventional approaches to reflective writing. Furthermore, they indicate a need to reconsider how well these metaphors reflect social work practice experience with poverty.

A posthumanist reading of the “happy” fish in The Zhuangzi

ABSTRACT This article argues for an alternative interpretation of the happy fish scene in The Zhuangzi: the fish are not happy. The fish undergo an unpleasant experience while the philosophers debate animatedly over the joy of the fish. The dramatization of the fish scene compels us to contemplate anthropocentrism and species communication. Moreover, the contrast between the fish-bird becoming and the subsequent human narrations reinforces the anthropocentric usurpation of nonhuman agency. To get away from anthropocentrism, Zhuangzi proposes a posthumanist approach to deal with species communication in three interconnected stages: to acknowledge the limits of human cognition, to forget anthropocentric prejudice, and to de-obscure childlike innocence.

Virtual wildlife tourism: an ideal form of ecotourism?

ABSTRACT Wildlife populations are plummeting worldwide and captivity, of at least some, species is increasingly being challenged from an ethical perspective. When captivity serves human entertainment, poor treatment as well as unequal power-relationships are problematic. Particularly for wildlife ecotourism then, we ask: is the future virtual? Taking a posthumanist approach, this conceptual manuscript considers whether presenting technologically created images to tourists can equitably foreground non-human rights, welfare, and agency. We highlight examples of tourism involving wildlife in virtual settings to explore possible advantages and disadvantages of this type of experience for human and non-human stakeholders. This enables us to explore how the virtual experience fits with the concept of ecotourism. The argument is made that the ideals of wildlife ecotourism can best, and perhaps only, be met virtually – but only if we use images of non-human animals who are represented with dignity and respect.

포스트-휴머니즘적 접근과 회집체로서의 학습체계, 그리고 포스트-평생학습론 사유

Lifelong learning research is continuously influenced by new scientific trends. The posthumanist approach that has recently moved into the mainstream is also increasingly influencing the understanding of lifelong learning. The posthumanist approach's 'more-than-human' perspective aligns with the attempt to understand human learning from an object-oriented and flat ontological standpoint. Posthumanism redefines ontology, offering a different perspective from the previous anthropocentric worldview, that is, the modernist worldview. In this transitional phase, we aim to address three meaningful questions:. 1. Why is it important to understand lifelong learning from the perspective of the posthumanist approach? 2. How does this shift in perspective capture the phenomenological reality of lifelong learning? 3. What new dimension does this approach uncover? The posthumanist approach has liberated lifelong learning from the constraints of educational 'essentialism'. In early models of lifelong learning research, humans were depicted as subjective beings, yet they were often confined to reproducing a predetermined world and essence. Although humans have been portrayed as self-directed learners, the actual learning process has always been tied to curriculums, competencies, and fixed outcomes. A truly Copernican shift in learning starts with relocating lifelong learning to an object-oriented perspective. Post-humanism rejects human pretentious subjectivity and reduces the burden of knowledge imposed upon them by the world. The traditional subject-centered learning theory was reinterpreted as object-oriented in this paper. The essence of the post-lifelong learning concept we are discussing is to move away from understanding learning as the accumulation of individual knowledge by Cartesian individuals. Instead, it is about viewing learning in terms of 'extension performed by activity systems'. In this paper, the researchers, first, redefined the concept of learning within the context of the 'more-than-human' dimension. Second, the learning process was redefined as an activity within a learning system that transcends the object-centeredness of learning and encompasses a systematic level including human-material-desire-movement. Third, the learning system was conceptualized based on the idea of assemblage or assemblage ontology. The combination and movement within the system are described as a process of 'becoming' that emerges from and is produced within the system's elements. Fourth, this lifelong learning phenomenon centered around the 'learning system' was differentiated from the previous learning ontology, which was based on isomorphism. We define this new framework as 3.0, that is, post-lifelong learning, marking it as distinct from the previous lifelong learning concepts of 1.0 or 2.0.

Progressing the understanding of chronic illness and its treatment: A post-human, ethological understanding of haemodialysis.

Haemodialysis is a common treatment option offered internationally for people requiring kidney replacement therapy. Research exploring haemodialysis is predominantly clinical and quantitative, and improvements to its provision and receipt tends also to be clinically focused. In recent years, however, a number of studies have sought to explore the lived experience of haemodialysis. These studies tend to use semi-structured interviews and present descriptive findings. Such findings serve to raise the profile of patient perspectives and encourage thinking beyond the clinical gaze. To progress this, we apply a post-humanism approach to the understanding of the receipt of haemodialysis. Drawing on findings from a study to explore the experience and impact of in-centre, daytime, haemodialysis we follow Fox and Alldred's ethological toolkit to provide a post-human analysis of haemodialysis. In doing so we argue that haemodialysis exists as a heterogenous and changeable assemblage of multiple and fluid, human and non-human factors that has the capacity to affect. Here we outline this post-human approach and the impact it has for understanding not just haemodialysis but also the receipt of treatment for other chronic illnesses.

Cutting facts and values together-apart: an agential realist exploration of Swedish sexuality education

ABSTRACT Drawing from a practice-based research study in Swedish secondary schools, the aim of this paper is to explore how facts and values are made and unmade as separate and entangled phenomena in sexuality education. In this exploration, we work with a posthumanist approach – agential realism – and more specifically the concept of agential cuts. The empirical material draws from two moments in the teaching of sexuality education, one concerning nakedness and one concerning gender diversity. The analysis puts forward how the lesson topics in relation to school subjects and exercises become significant actors in how facts and values are enacted in the teaching. This implies that facts and values are enacted together-apart within a relational set of interdependency and hence are always present although temporarily more forcefully and ephemeral. To conclude, we discuss the complexities of how facts and values are part of enacting the everchanging knowledge area of sexuality education and urge for acknowledgement of this matter.

The AcademicAssessmentMachine: Posthuman Possibilities of/for Doing Assignments and Assessments Differently

This article brings a posthuman approach to assignments and assessments as they are configured in and by normative practices in educational institutions, including schools and universities. Composed as a collaborative posthuman autoethnography, we use the figuration of the AcademicAssessmentMachine to illuminate how educational assessment-as-usual positions, hierarchizes, grades, and disposes human bodies—both teachers and students—in ways that are affectively damaging and socially unjust. In rethinking educational assignments and assessment as a more-than-human affair, we swerve its purpose and doings toward more affirmative possibilities. We ask how might we disrupt the AcademicAssessmentMachine while being caught within it ourselves?

Rethinking community-engaged pedagogy through posthumanist theory

ABSTRACT This paper presents research on a posthumanist approach for reframing community-engaged pedagogy. We employ posthumanist theory as a way to examine the educational possibilities of ethically engaging with technologies and materials as a means to build and sustain community partnerships for social justice. This research project employs a diffractive inquiry involving interview encounters with 20 college writing instructors. The posthumanist approach presented in this paper provides a window into understanding how a myriad of human-material assemblages, response-able designs, and affective encounters shape and transform community-engaged pedagogy. In the context of community-engaged writing, the posthumanist approach oftentimes coincides with the use of multiple modes of communication, such as text, image, sound, and video, to foreground marginalized communities and their perspectives. Through allowing for the expression of multiple voices and perspectives, including those of non-human entities, this approach further challenges and disrupts traditional human-centric and dualistic views of community-engaged pedagogy.

Botanica postumana. Incontri dis-antropocentrici con culture indigene e vegetali

ABSTRACT This essay explores how two Italian scientists, Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano, promote a non-anthropocentric understanding of plant behaviour and intelligence. While Mancuso⁣ develops a non-anthropocentric approach by establishing a cross-cultural exchange with vegetal systems of knowledge, Gagliano's cross-cultural exchange with plants has been further deepened through the mediation of several indigenous cultures. I argue that their research, in addition to expanding our understanding of the vegetal experience of the world, cultivates a posthuman approach that questions the centrality of Western cultural and human intellective exceptionalism.

Futures of Care: Care Technologies and Graphic Medicine.

Assistive care technologies, developed to replace, support, or extend human capabilities and to address the surging demands of care, have been gaining prominence recently. The current trend summons a posthuman approach through decentering the privileged role of humans in several spaces of caregiving, such as hospitals and eldercare homes. The existence of these cutting-edge assistive technologies, exciting as they are, hints at a possible future when the distinction between humans and technology will be blurred, thus transforming care relations. However, these technological advances carry equal promises and dangers. While care robots may reduce the burden of caregiving, they also threaten to minimize human contact with vulnerable populations. This critical assessment reviews technological advances in care and close-reads several single-panel cartoons to theorize the impact of technologies on caring relations. The article also examines the neoliberal underpinnings of such technologies and the moral dangers of their unreflective use.

Futures of Care: Care Technologies and Graphic Medicine.

Assistive care technologies, developed to replace, support, or extend human capabilities and to address the surging demands of care, have been gaining prominence recently. The current trend summons a posthuman approach through decentering the privileged role of humans in several spaces of caregiving, such as hospitals and eldercare homes. The existence of these cutting-edge assistive technologies, exciting as they are, hints at a possible future when the distinction between humans and technology will be blurred, thus transforming care relations. However, these technological advances carry equal promises and dangers. While care robots may reduce the burden of caregiving, they also threaten to minimize human contact with vulnerable populations. This critical assessment reviews technological advances in care and close-reads several single-panel cartoons to theorize the impact of technologies on caring relations. The article also examines the neoliberal underpinnings of such technologies and the moral dangers of their unreflective use.

Generative AI and education ecologies

What role can generative AI have an art and design education? Given that we are in a year of change as open-source Open AI systems shift how we teach, learn, and assess in times of question-answering chatbot and personal assistance tools. Applying a post-human approach (Blaikie, et al, 2020) to education might help us rethink pedagogy (Wessels, et al, 2022), knowledge creation and scholarly publication for knowledge sharing. In this SoTEL Symposium presentation/discussion with the ASCILITE MLSIG I propose a move away from a humanist world view that continues to shape our thoughts around the binary of teacher-learner within our walled disciplinary and consider how we might Incorporate generative AI tools in the curriculum to foster interdisciplinary collaborations with the more-than human. What if we shifted teaching and learning to facilitate new ways of being on the planet, so that we prioritised ourselves, one another as well as non-human and more-than-humans in our educational ecologies. Building the digital literacies and computational thinking capabilities (George-Reyes, et al, 2021) to learn with GAI will create opportunities to thinking about the world and all its space and places, as interconnected and entangled.
 In this trendsetter webinar I pose a series of questions and prompts that I had in conversation with Chatty G (ChatGPT) to consider how we might imagine and understand the world in different ways so that we might integrate generative AI and into our education ecologies in higher education.
 Presentation: https://doi.org/10.26188/22281685

The impossible, necessary outside of nature: a Luhmannian intervention into post-humanist ecology

ABSTRACT In the wake of climate change, social theory has been subject to a surge of new materialist and posthuman approaches that reconfigure ontology and politics beyond the modern nature/culture binary which the Anthropocene has rendered untenable. But their (re-)turn to ontological speculation brackets the socio-epistemic situatedness and productivity of the way we think nature and its relationship to society. This paper reads Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as a posthuman perspective that can address the epistemological blind spot of materialist-ecological thought. Luhmann’s ecology aligns with the former on the posthuman framing of shaping power, the productivity of an environmental outside that remains unknown, and the call for political modesty which follows. On the other hand, Luhmann’s theory poses a critical challenge to materialist-ecological thought: the society/environment binary is here constitutively necessary, and its mapping onto a nature/culture binary functionally advantageous for subjects and social systems because it offers opportunities for complexity-reduction.

Moulding a Villain in Billion Dollar Whale: A Post-Humanist Approach

Moulding a Villain in Billion Dollar Whale: A Post-Humanist Approach