Posthuman Research Articles

Noise, ecological crises, and the posthuman sensibility of Michel Serres in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

ABSTRACT This article revisits Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi film Under the Skin, ten years on from its release in 2013, to re-read it through Michel Serres’s posthuman philosophy as an allegorical warning about the ongoing ecological crises. Making this argument involves recognizing, through Serres, the crucial role of artistic practice in questioning our current neglect of sensible modes of being. Focusing upon the importance of ‘noise’ within Serres’s posthuman thinking, this article considers the alignment between the sensibility of ‘The Female’ in Under the Skin – an alien in human form (portrayed by Scarlett Johansson) – and the virtue of sensibility advocated by Serres of being ‘on the cusp of sense in the making’ (Webb 2018): a dynamic position situated between the chaotic noise of the world and the limitations of human language (Serres 2016). In combination with Glazer’s direction, the original musical score by Mica Levi and innovative sound design by Johnnie Burn are central to the argument. An additional aim of the article is to show the significance of Serres’s thinking within cultural studies, where this philosophy is currently undervalued.

Reconfiguring environmental sustainability education by exploring past/present/future pedagogical openings with preservice teachers

ABSTRACT This research adopts post-qualitative inquiry to trace the teachings and learnings with an environmental sustainability subject for preservice teachers at an Australian university. Humanist discourses of ‘education for sustainability’ and ‘default environmental practices’ often act to heavily stratify educational spaces, becoming obstacles for alternative perspectives. How might novice teachers connect with the personal (what they learn), the professional (what they teach) ecological literacy and what is ethical (ecological justice), whilst confronting the political and social causations of environmental concerns? In response to these questions, the authors illustrate how they disrupted dominant conceptualisations of teaching environmental sustainability in higher education with pedagogical openings that animate us to think differently. Ecological, relational and critical posthuman philosophies help to orientate co-learnings with students. By blending the familiar, whilst also experimenting with speculative practices and playful learning, we have sought to expand the potential for (re)focusing past/present/future entanglements of human and more-than-human lifeworlds.

Misunderstandings around Posthumanism. Lost in Translation? Metahumanism and Jaime del Val’s “Metahuman Futures Manifesto” (2022)

Posthumanism is still a largely debated new field of contemporary philosophy that mainly aims at broadening the Humanist perspective. Academics, researchers, scientists, and artists are constantly transforming and evolving theories and arguments, around the existing streams of Posthumanist thought, Critical Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Metahumanism, discussing whether they can finally integrate or follow completely different paths towards completely new directions. This paper, written for the 1st Metahuman Futures Forum (Lesvos 2022) will focus on Metahumanism and Jaime del Val’s “Metahuman Futures Manifesto” (2022) mainly as an open dialogue with Critical Posthumanism.

Metahuman Studies, Choral Ontopolitics and Earth Liberation

Metahumanism is presented as an evolution from critical posthumanism both in terms of an intensified critique of the Planetary Holocaust and of a radical pragmatics of becoming based on a movement philosophy which has diverse precursors back to the pre-Socratics and beyond. Metahuman studies and its critical counterpart in Trash-human studies is the corresponding studies field promoted by the Metahuman Futures Forum, an alternative whose urgency is justified due to the prevailing human supremacism in other existing intellectual and activist milieus, and which culminates in the performative proposal for a ‘Trial against Humanity’. A choral politics of moving bodies is introduced through the Vision Statement of the Bodynet-Khorós EU project, aiming at a liberation of al life forms from human dominion and its extinction loop, for a metahuman r/evolution.

Critical ethnography and its others: Entanglement of matter/meaning/madness.

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts-based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist-based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning-making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment.

From 'if-then' to 'what if?' Rethinking healthcare algorithmics with posthuman speculative ethics.

This article discusses the role that algorithmic thinking and management play in health care and the kind of exclusions this might create. We argue that evidence-based medicine relies on research and data to create pathways for patient journeys. Coupled with data-based algorithmic prediction tools in health care, they establish what could be called health care algorithmics-a mode of management of healthcare that produces forms of algorithmic governmentality. Relying on a critical posthumanist perspective, we show how healthcare algorithmics is contingent on the way authority over bodies is produced and how predictive health care algorithms can reproduce inequalities of the worlds from which they are made, centreing possible futures on existing normativities regulated through algorithmic biopower. In contrast to that, we explore posthuman speculative ethics as a way to challenge understanding of 'ethics' and 'care' in healthcare algorithmics. We suggest some possible avenues towards working speculative ethics into health care while still being critically attentive to algorithmic modes of management and prediction in health care.

Mattering: Per/forming nursing philosophy in the Chthulucene.

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled 'What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?' examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra-activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany-including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter.

Farewell to humanism? Considerations for nursing philosophy and research in posthuman times.

In this paper, I argue that critical posthumanism is a crucial tool in nursing philosophy and scholarship. Posthumanism entails a reconsideration of what 'human' is and a rejection of the whole tradition founding Western life in the 2500 years of our civilization as narrated in founding texts and embodied in governments, economic formationsand everyday life. Through an overview of historical periods, textsand philosophy movements, I problematize humanism, showing how it centres white, heterosexual, able-bodied Man at the top of a hierarchy of beings, and runs counter to many current aspirations in nursing and other disciplines: decolonization, antiracism, anti-sexismand Indigenous resurgence. In nursing, the term humanism is often used colloquially to mean kind and humane; yet philosophically, humanism denotes a Western philosophical tradition whose tenets underpin much of nursing scholarship. These underpinnings of Western humanism have increasingly become problematic, especially since the 1960s motivating nurse scholars to engage with antihumanist and, recently, posthumanist theory. However, even current antihumanist nursing arguments manifest deep embeddedness in humanistic methodologies. I show both the problematic underside of humanism and critical posthumanism's usefulness as a tool to fight injustice and examine the materiality of nursing practice. In doing so, I hope to persuade readers not to be afraid of understanding and employing this critical tool in nursing research and scholarship.

Making kin: Exploring new philosophical and pedagogical openings in sustainability education in higher education

This paper is an exploration of evolving ideas, urgencies, and actions that we have experimented with in our teaching of an environmental sustainability subject with pre-service teachers at an Australian university. It is a work in progress. Through this shared educator-student teaching and learning process we feel the tensions of contradictory forces that disrupt the flow of prior teaching as we all become unsettled by hope and reality, grief, and loss, all mixed in with a sense of urgency and tempered by a set of often unimaginative contemporary pedagogical practices. These tensions often resort educators like us, to perpetuate well-worn and critiqued tropes such as how to ‘care for the planet’ through ‘greening’ practices in schools such as recycling and energy conservation. Always inadequate and limited we are experimenting in our pedagogical repertoire with new ways to teach as we could no longer keep up the charade of agitating for change in the same way. In this paper we explore some of the opening and closures that effect environmental sustainability teaching. We consider how through a reimagining of sustainability education with new pedagogical openings of ‘making kin’ we first attend to these emotional tensions as a means of waking up to who we are in the Anthropocene and then find ways to identify relational ethico-onto-epistemologies in our teaching. By disrupting humanist paradigms and embracing critical posthumanist sensitivities the educators and students nuzzle into new ways of knowing and being in the world.

The Posthuman Homo Faber in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: An Ironic Portrayal

As a dystopia, Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake speculates the looming consequences of scientific inventions and technologies manifested in the destruction of natural equilibrium and posthuman complexities. Homo sapiens' unlimited desires and aspirations for enhancement and excellence have driven humans to enact the Creator. Crake, almost a mad scientist in the novel, creates the Crakers — genetically modified humans. To analyze this life force, the paper uses theoretical insights of humanists like Giannozzo Manetti, Rene Descartes and Friedrich Nietzsche regarding their celebration of human exceptionalism, reason, and free will. But, to counter-argue transgression in the pretext of progress, the paper also uses Donna Haraway’s concept of inter-speciesism and Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism. They promote interdependence, critical review of the past and abstinence to address the posthuman crises and existential dilemmas. The enhanced Crakers are immune to starvation and ordinary diseases, devoid of art, imagination and creativity; but ironically feed on grass and their own excrement, and lack the essence of being human. They challenge Crake's genome project by transcending the lab-limitations but adapting to natural evolution. Hence, this paper examines Atwood's speculation of how modern science and technology distorts the symbiosis and disfigures the humans resulting in unwanted negotiations for survival. A post-human homofaber, Crake tries to resolve the existential crisis by eliminating the Bastion of humanity itself but ironically dehumanizes the human. The question is how far will humanity overrule nature? Who is accountable to repair the earth? Thus, this paper enables a thought exercise to retrospect on human insensibility and undergo abstinence of desires and luxury to save the future of this planet and lives from facing the impending apocalypse, as shown in the novel.

New Bottles for Old Wine? On Playing God: Post- and Transhumanism from the Perspective of Kalām

Abstract Post- and transhumanist discourses have evolved out of the humanist discourse and deal with the social, economic, and ethical challenges that arise in the wake of technological advances. These are questions such as the following: If the technical prerequisites are met, should we support human cloning, radical life extension, or the creation of artificial bodies into which we can upload our minds? Although there are numerous publications by Muslim legal scholars contributing to the posthumanist discourse within the framework of the bioethical discourse, there is still little to no scholarship tackling the post- and transhumanist discourse from the perspective of kalām, the systematic theology of Islam. So far, only a few articles that approach this task can be identified. This article gives an overview of the core theological positions of Muslim researchers in post- and transhumanist discourse and offers a systematic critical analysis of the presented contributions from the perspective of kalām. It argues that the Critical Posthumanist approach provides a fertile ground for Muslim scholars to contribute in. Hence it can also be read as a contribution to the emerging scholarly field of new kalām (kalām al-jadīd).

Notes on [post]human nursing: What It MIGHT Be, What it is Not.

With this paper, we walk out some central ideas about posthumanisms and the ways in which nursing is already deeply entangled with them. At the same time, we point to ways in which nursing might benefit from further entanglement with other ideas emerging from posthumanisms. We first offer up a brief history of posthumanisms, following multiple roots to several points of formation. We then turn to key flavors of posthuman thought to differentiate between them and clarify our collective understanding and use of the terms. This includes considerations of the threads of transhumanism, critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and the speculative, affirmative ethics that arise from critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. These ideas are fruitful for nursing, and already in action in many cases, which is the matter we occupy ourselves with in the final third of the paper. We consider the ways nursing is already posthuman-sometimes even critically so-and the speculative worldbuilding of nursing as praxis. We conclude with visions for a critical posthumanist nursing that attends to humans and other/more/nonhumans, situated and material and embodied and connected, in relation.

A Tale of Two Sophias: A Proposal for Critical Posthuman Youth Work, and Why We Need It

This paper begins by recounting a tale of two Sophias: a humanoid robot and an ‘illegal’ baby immigrant. The tale of two Sophias locates my initial ideas for reflecting on how critical posthumanism might contribute to youth work theory and practice. In this paper I position youth work as a philosophical encounter, whilst also questioning the humanist legacy that lies at the heart of youth work theory. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti and other critical posthuman feminists, I consider how youth work might respond to the posthuman predicament marked by the intersecting forces of advanced capitalism and growing inequalities, the fourth industrial revolution, the digital divide, and advances in Artificial Intelligence, climate change, and environmental destruction. I conclude by providing some reflections on how critical posthuman theory may provide a lens through which young people might consider what it means to be human in the technologically mediated Anthropocene, and also as a paradigm for embracing new possibilities and a praxis of hope.

The Logic of Posthuman Inquiry: Affirmative Politics, Validity, and Futurities

Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs familiar forms of inference and is also forwarding a distinctive array of inferential practices that until now have not been commonly present in mainstream/whitestream social sciences. Attending to the logic of emerging posthumanist empiricism can help clarify the affirmative ethics and politics of posthumanist inquiry. This essay offers that a modal, dialethic, paraconsistent logic of action is more suited to posthumanist inquiry than a classical logic of representation. This logic of action locates validity not with the accuracy of representations, but in the specific character of the futurities enabled and disabled by the ontologically generative action of inquiry. Implications for an axiology of posthumanist empiricism are explored.

Gift or Weapon? Reproductive Decision, the Phenomenology of Pregnancy, and Alien Language in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival

Abstract This essay analyzes Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film, Arrival, and elucidates its strikingly original meditation on the ethics of reproduction and the relationships between and among embodied maternal subjectivity, language, and temporality. Drawing on deconstructive theories of language and relationality as well as on the writing of scholars working at the intersection of reproductive biology and feminist philosophy, the essay argues that Arrival uses some of the generic features of science fiction cinema (alien encounter and time travel) to articulate a feminist and posthumanist philosophy of relation and care. Focusing on the film's language of risk, danger, contamination, and even social disintegration, Arrival prompts us to consider how a particularly suggestive account of the maternal-fetal relationship, and of the process of fostering and becoming a relationally determined being, simultaneously engages with the fraught question of reproductive choice and reproductive justice in our contemporary moment. Meditating on the film's visual, sonic, and conceptual representations of the “placental wall” and of the “parasitical” structure of pregnancy, the essay shows how Arrival parallels feminist readings of the materiality of pregnancy that deconstruct the self-possessed or “virile” subject of patriarchal individualism.

Early Childhood Education and Care Towards Sustainable Academic Performance in Accounting

This study aimed to design a strategy to improve the academic performance of early childhood education and care (ECEC) learners in mathematics, and thence accounting, in a sustainable manner. Accounting is not taught as a separate subject to mathematics at the ECEC level, therefore we focused on those aspects of mathematics that link directly with central learning areas in accounting. We used participatory action research, and posthuman theory framed the study. Multistakeholder participation was used to encourage five key skills of the 21st century (collaboration, communication, compassion, critical thinking, and creativity) in the learners as co-researchers in order to promote sustainability in their learning of mathematics in ECEC as basis for accounting in the future.

Towards a posthuman turn in drag: Will the queer ever be human?

What is drag? (How) can we understand drag performance beyond gender? Given the growing trend in drag performance towards the un/gendered non/post/in/human, we reconsider what, precisely, makes a performance drag. Integrating insights from queer theory, performance studies and critical posthumanism, this editorial develops a framework to not only provide an orientation to the individual contributions of this Special Issue, but also argue for a larger theoretical turn in drag scholarship. We consider the composite materiality of and relationship between the human performer and their posthuman drag, and propose that the act of dragging, which can use, but does not exclusively rely on gender, constitutes a more expansive queer performance modality that makes the familiar strange, yet allows for recognition in what is otherwise unintelligible. Posthuman drag celebrates the abject, the marginal and the un/imaginable, shifts the focus from disaster to potentiality and imagines a future in which queers can be human.

From Posthumanist Anaesthetics to Promethean Dialectics: Further Considerations on the Category of the Hysterical Sublime

This essay proposes a critique of posthumanist critical theory through the development of the category of the hysterical sublime, a concept first introduced by Fredric Jameson in his early writings on postmodernism. While some critical posthumanist theories equate representationalism with a transcendental humanism, representation is inherent to the kinds of abstractions required in theory as such. Taking up the posthumanist resistance to anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism, the concept of the hysterical sublime—as opposed to the category of the modern sublime, regarding nature—is used to convey the way that posthumanism undermines its own ethical injunctions by invoking fatalistic representations of human action. Instead, this essay defends the return to dialectical humanism as an appropriate framework for thinking the rational and material conditions required for ethical human action.

Life in the Grotto: Montaigne & the Meaning of Posthumanism

ABSTRACT This article delineates two principles of the grotesque in Renaissance visual art, texts, and garden grottoes, one more superficial and one more radical. In sixteenth-century Europe, the latter mode finds its most striking manifestation in the Essays (1580–95) of Michel de Montaigne. The Essays offer a paradigm for grotesque thinking, one that crucially inflects contemporary ideas on the potentialities, and aporias, of posthumanist theory, life, and ethics. Grotesque ornaments, garden grottoes, and the essay à la Montaigne are here reread as provocative object lessons for bringing into focus the difference between a superficial and a constitutive posthumanism still to come.

포스트휴먼 인문학의 이론적 배경 및 성격과 연구의 방향

This study aims to propose theoretical backgrounds, characteristics, and research directions for posthuman humanities research. To achieve this goal, the study poses three research questions: 1) What is the conceptual background of posthuman humanities? 2) On what philosophical bases can the posthuman humanities be discussed and explored? 3) With what perspectives can the posthuman humanities address the major themes of the humanities? The study argues that four theories of posthumanism (new materialism, object-oriented ontology, post-phenomenology, and non-representational theory) can comprehensively suggest ethical perspectives for posthuman humanities. Additionally, the study examines three philosophical considerations: ontology, epistemology, and axiology, to explore the posthuman being, knowledge, and world views of posthuman society, and the criteria of values for the posthuman society. The study also discusses the conceptualization of language in the context of multiculturalism through the lens of posthuman perspectives. The findings of this study may offer new insights into posthumanism in the field of humanities.