Posthuman Turn Research Articles

El giro posthumanista en las humanidades y sus implicaciones para la filosofía de la técnica

El presente trabajo pretende evaluar críticamente los impactos del denominado “giro posthumanista” para la filosofía de la técnica, con especial referencia al problema del estatuto ontológico de los artefactos. En primer término se reconstruye el significado y los alcances del giro posthumanista en ciencias sociales y humanas al tiempo que se muestra en qué sentido dicho giro pone en cuestión una serie de conceptos operativos tradicionales para la filosofía. En segundo lugar, este artículo propone admitir una versión “débil” de posthumanismo para la filosofía de la técnica. En este sentido se señalan dos líneas de investigación que abren el juego a este enfoque “débil”. La primera de ellas consiste en la exploración de los aspectos inmanentes de los objetos técnicos. La segunda nos compromete a introducir la categoría de “hibridación” a fin de dar cuenta de las complejas y multidimensionales relaciones entre humanos y ambientes.

Constructing Human Versus Non-Human Climate Migration in the Anthropocene: The Case of Migrating Polar Bears in Nunavut, Canada

Critical anthropology is currently awash with research aimed at disabling human exceptionalism, alignment with indigenous knowledge, decolonisation of thought, and the taking of the posthuman turn. Meanwhile states with settler colonial histories, such as Canada, also seek to align policies with indigenous knowledge and seek reconciliation with indigenous peoples. This article examines this trend by analyzing the conflict occurring in Nunavut between the Canadian state and Inuit communities living there, over the migration of polar bears. In this context, indigenous knowledge clashes with the rationalities and policies of the state. Claiming support from biological science, the state argues that the migration of the bears indicates their threatened status, while the Inuit argues it to be an expression of polar bear resilience. What does this clash of rationalities tell us about the integrity of the posthuman turn, given that its legitimacy depends on claims of alignment with indigenous knowledge and interests as well as opposition to western science and colonial state power? States with colonial histories, including Canada, as well as international organisations including the United Nations, are at pains these days to stress the extent to which their policy responses to the climate crisis are informed by indigenous knowledge. However, the construction of indigenous knowledge in the policies of colonial states, as much as in critical anthropology, is rendered problematic by the analysis offered in this article. Were Inuit knowledge and perspectives on the climate migration of polar bears to be taken seriously, different policies and different approaches, based on the privileging of the human over and against the interests of the animal would have to prevail.

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.

The politics of dark ecologies in Deepan Sivaraman’s Peer Gynt

This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son of the elf princess, and a hell hound, a concept invented by Sivaraman while adapting the verse play of the Norwegian playwright into Malayalam and English. The dark ecological aesthetics of the production functioned like Bertolt Brecht's Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt, offering a dialectical point to the audience to reterritorialize their understanding of the Indian nation-state and its ecology. In the first part of the article, I analyse the Indian dramatic form of bhana used by Sivaraman to articulate the discourse of what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology,' and argue that the bhana's satirical narrative remained central to writings of Otherness. In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how the production mounted imbricated narratives of ecological awareness on the stage through the figures of the elf princess, her son, and a hell hound that relentlessly witnessed the capitalist journey of Peer. By offering an active agency to these figures through the scenography, Sivaraman's production interrogated the Indian nation-state's definition of ecology. Significantly, in its choice of a non-human witness, the production destabilized the human centre and pointed towards a post-human ecological turn. Although Ibsen's aesthetics have been used countless times in India to stage the anxieties of the female gender and minority communities, this was the first time they were employed in India to stage dark ecology; Sivaraman's production began where Ibsen's play ends. In the first scene itself, the audience members found themselves face to face with Peer's spirit - rather than the flesh and blood Peer of Ibsen’s play - begging God for another chance at life so that he could become a better man. When Peer is offered a second chance, he uncannily uses it to become a non-resident businessman involved in mining. The performance showed how scenography could be used to articulate a dark and depressing ecological awareness.

(Re)writing Sappho: Navigating Sappho's (Posthuman) Poetic Identity in Ovid, Heroides 15

This article explores Ovid's Heroides 15 (the Epistula Sapphus) through a post-human feminist approach, engaging with the most recent scholarly debate on (Ovid's) Sappho's polysemous poetic language, polyphonic narrative, and gender fluidity. Drawing from recently published works that explore the intersections between posthumanism and antiquity, I show that Her. 15 is resituated within the 'posthuman turn' and accordingly reinterpreted as an expression of Ovid's and Sappho's poetic identity. Sappho's self-identification with her polymorphic poetry, assimilation into the natural world, and transitional sexual identity serve to both downplay and destabilize her role as a poetic subject, while at the same time enhancing her (and Ovid's) poetic creation. The idea of poetry as a self-shaping force is articulated by the agency that certain poetic objects (e.g., the letter, the poem, the verses), as well as other animate or inanimate natural elements (e.g., the branches and birds), hold within the epistle. Ovid has Sappho forego her poetic agency and question her literary skills; however, her poetic identity is also reaffirmed and strengthened precisely by the composition of her epistle. The displacement of the 'human' poet thus serves to enhance the centrality of the artistic, literary work. This dialectic between the limits of Sappho as a poet and the boundlessness of her poetry persists until—and reaches its peak at—the end of Her. 15, where Sappho anticipates her self-murder. Her (foretold) leap in the waters of the Leucadian Sea (217–220) can be interpreted both as a form of self-annihilation and as a means of stressing the permanence and timelessness of her own and Ovid's poetic talents.

Постгуманистический поворот к пост(не)человеческому

The article shows the retrospective of such modern philosophical movement as posthumanism, one of the basic ideas of which is the “posthuman”. The posthu­man in posthumanism is understood not as a being who has overcome his biol­ogy (as in transhumanism), but as a point of assembly of mythical, chimerical, technological, social, biological; as a further deconstruction of humanistic “vitru­vian man”. This aspect reveals the exceptional features of the new anthropology of posthumanism, which makes it possible to show the difference between tran­shumanism and posthumanism. The evolution of humanism, through anti-hu­manism and transhumanism (which is understood as “hyperhumanism”) leads to posthumanism. Its main features, according to R. Braidotti and Fr. Ferrando, are post-anthropocentrism, post-dualism and post-humanism. The article analyses each of these concepts, which allows us to delve deeper into the contexts of con­temporary philosophical anthropology. The analysis of the posthuman turn to­wards non-human agents and, as a consequence, the general trend of tendency of contemporary philosophy to the de-anthropologization is being carried out. The genealogy of this phenomenon includes fatigue from the hierarchy of hu­manism ideals, which, as M. Foucault showed back in the middle of the twenti­eth century, were conditioned by historical prerequisites of cultural development. Inheriting ideas of postmodern philosophy, gender theory, post-colonial studies, animal studies, unable studies, actor-network theory, and even quantum physics, posthumanism opens up a space for being in terms of subjectivity for all others previously oppressed in the era of humanism (animals, women, and all those whom Aristotle, as opposed to bios, referred to zoe). To illustrate this thesis, the article introduces a new term “post(non)human”, which reveals the concept of posthumanist discourse. The use of this term allows us to express more compre­hensively the results and consequences of the posthumanist turn in the philo­sophical anthropology of the twenty-first century.

Zwierzęce cmentarze jako miejsca performansu kulturowego

Using the tools and definitions provided by performance studies (Richard Schechner, Jon McKenzie, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Małgorzata Sugiera, Dariusz Kosiński and others) as well as by newer post-human turn (Ewa Domańska) the author analyses the phenomenon of burying domestic animals on sites located on the outskirts of populated areas (resembling the old cholera graveyards). Animal burial sites are denied the term ‘cemetery’ by official legislation which reserves the notion only for human necropolises. Almost every suggestion of establishing an animal cemetery in Poland is met with highly emotional reactions and protests. Itself being acts of social performance, the protests evoke burial as a social performance art, where the community participates in an event based on a standard Christian funeral ceremony. The unstandardized character of the animal’s funeral challenges this view. In the act of animal burial an oppressive gaze of a society is juxtaposed with an intimate one. The confrontation becomes a chance for the society for a self-reflection and transformation. Hence one may prove that the animal burials have a significant performative power and can have social and cultural impact.

The Materiality of Poiesis

This article attempts to explain the reason behind a secondary division within the Spinozian immanence principle - a principle that occurs, or is construed, within what could be seen (after Deleuze) as the level of practice, and that remains crucial to the so-called posthumanist turn. Posthumanism seems to ascribe an important role to claims and theses that are oriented towards the abolishment of all dichotomies that rupture the existing substance (dichotomies such as form-matter, but also internal-external, subject-object, soul-body, reflection-truth/experience). Interestingly, embracing such a performative perspective - one in which philosophy or theory is something that is „performed” - is only possible when the division between the „immanence of practice” and the „poststructuralist” ideas of literariness or textuality is maintained and emphasised. The reason for this is that the latter has been strongly associated with the centrality of the human being, their language and their intellectual creations (see e.g. Braidotti, Barad). But, as I would like to point out, referring to Deleuze and Guattari themselves, this allegedly poststructuralist framework has been successfully transcended by poststructuralists themselves. Nonetheless, this did not lead them to exclude the art of language - including literature which, seen here as a type of social practice, was among the chief interests of these French philosophers.

The Posthumanist Child: Pharmakon and Collodi's Pinocchio

The childlike elements of deconstruction—deconstruction's suggestion of play—require an interdisciplinary attention that they have previously not been afforded in scholarly discourse on Derrida. The power of the child in children's literature scholarship has similarly been immune to binary-disrupting forces common in adjacent literary fields; such immunity has been granted under the banner of ‘aetonormativity,’ which norms adult power while subverting that of the child. In light of the posthumanist turn in critical thinking, which demands a dissolution of binaries in favour of heterogeneity, deconstruction offers a novel approach to analysing the child in children's literature. In this paper, I draw upon Donna Haraway's diffractive approach to textual analysis to read Derrida's discussion of pharmakon through Maria Nikolajeva's conceptualization of aetonormativity. The resulting shift in understanding of both concepts allows for a reading of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio that explores a figure I term the posthumanist child, whose undecidable embodiment works to disrupt the aetonormative binary.

Prospects for a Postsecular Heritage Practice: Convergences between Posthumanism and Popular Religious Practice in Asia

By failing to document popular belief in the supernatural attributes of religious sites and by drawing up conservation management plans that fail to attend to such beliefs, current heritage regimes effectively perform a secular translation of them. I argue that the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular its openness to forms of agency, vibrancy and vitality in the object world, offers prospects for a kind of heritage practice newly comfortable with the vibrancy that belief in the supernatural lends to the things of popular religion. Focusing on the material heritage of popular religion in Asia—in particular in China and Southeast Asia—attitudes of devotees to the rebuilding of temples and shrines are examined. Practices of rebuilding and restoration come to be seen as a form of worship. While ontological differences between worshipers and heritage practitioners remain, it is possible to be positive about the prospects for a postsecular heritage practice precisely because the rationalist authority of established practice is so under challenge by the counter discourses of posthumanism, the new materialism, and related streams of thought.

Understanding the vital emergence and expression of aging: How matter comes to matter in gerontology's posthumanist turn

Recent years have witnessed the beginnings of a posthumanist turn in critical/cultural gerontology. This is a turn that is partly demanded by, and provides means for illuminating, the posthuman social condition that older people experience in the twenty-first century. That has incorporated contributions from a range of theoretical and empirical traditions including new materialisms, non-representational theory, science and technology studies, arts, performance and sensory studies. A turn that, decentring the human subject, has envisaged aging as a distributed process involving multiple interacting living/biological and material/technological actors and excessive forces. This paper describes three ontological understandings of the vital emergence and expression of aging that the turn has ultimately generated (aging emerging and expressed through relational material assemblages; aging enacted and performed by open vital bodies with vibrant objects; aging in immediate, pre-personal, more-than-representational space-times). It then describes how, rather than being sidelined, four longstanding humanistic concerns have been reimagined in scholarship in ‘more-than-human’, ‘other-than-fully conscious’ terms (meaning, disadvantage, agency, communication). It is suggested that together these understandings and reimaginings constitute an open theory on aging, and a possible way to frame future studies. However, acknowledging that there is still much to do, the paper concludes with some thoughts on future challenges and possibilities for posthumanist research on aging.

Affective Encounters of the Algorithmic Kind: Post-Truth and Posthuman Pleasure

This article goes beyond the current discourse on post-truth, fake news, and related developments by tracing the emergence of a broader and more fundamental change—a posthuman turn in politics. The article begins with examining the background of post-truth and the causes of its prominence. Those causes are found to primarily lie in the natural human predilection for pleasure and satisfaction as well as capacity for affective agglomeration. Such agglomeration is particularly manifest in the digital and, even more specifically, new media environment where the abundance of information and alignment opportunities has led to incessant competition of media and political actors for audience attention. The main weapon in this competitive struggle is maximization of consumer satisfaction, that is, pleasure (and not, e.g. veracity). However, the main transformative factor that both enable the maximization of satisfaction and lead to the posthuman turn is the abundance of data and the potential for its algorithmic analysis as well as interpretation of the results of such analysis. In this context, data-rich algorithm-wielding political actors are capable of knowing in advance the utterances and other affective triggers necessary to alter their audiences’ choice environments in such a way that it will have no other option but to choose the preferred outcome, receiving pleasure in return. However, the same political actors are simultaneously reduced to mouthpieces for algorithmically selected utterances instead of themselves being active shapers of political strategy. Consequently, humans must share agency with algorithms and other pieces of code, if not cede it altogether.

Divinely significant: towards a postsecular approach to the materiality of popular religion in Asia

ABSTRACT The material embeddedness of the divine in the objects and sites of popular religion in Asia establishes the grounds for a conflict between devotees and heritage practitioners – the same objects are central to the practice of each but each hones in on them via a radically different ontology. While in principle offering an even-handed consideration of all aspects of a thing’s meaning, the secular-rationalist underpinning of the practice of significance-assessment in heritage management acts to marginalise or even efface the eruptively miraculous qualities of divine sites and objects. It serves, in other words, as a regime of insignificance. Against this background, I argue that the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular its openness to forms of agency, vibrancy and vitality in the object world, offers prospects for a kind of heritage practice newly comfortable with the vibrancy that belief in the supernatural lends to the things of popular religion. There has, I suggest, never been a better time for heritage practice to get over its problem with the supernatural.

More-than-human geographies of property: Moving towards spatial justice with response-ability

In this paper we examine how animal and more-than-human agency matters in changing property relations and the related production of spatial (in)justice. We do this by examining conflicts arising between farmers, land owners and reindeer herders in the Norwegian outfields resulting from policy imperatives towards agricultural diversification. At the heart of the conflict we find issues of animal agency and mobility that the current regulatory system negotiating the interests of different rightsholders struggles to comprehend or deal with. We propose Haraway’s concept of response-ability as one way in which more-than-human agency could be made more visible, and therefore better accounted for, in the unsettling and resettling of property relations and the law-space nexus generally. It allows us to interrogate more precisely on multiple levels of spatial and temporal production the responses available to human and nonhuman actors in various assemblages of property. Different rightsholders can have different capacities to respond when property assemblages are stabilised and destabilised. We also call for more attention to be paid to property and broader legal geographies and spatial justice in the current ‘animal’ and posthuman turn in social science.

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

From human to posthuman

The urgency of the research problem and its significance for theory and practice. The present time turns to be a qualitatively new stage that differs from the previous ones, namely by huge deployment of the modern period of the scientific and technological revolution, the consequence of these processes is posthuman turn. The main content of this turn is that people in their activities go beyond objective reality. The aim and objectives of the article. The aim of the research is socio-philosophical analyses of the processes of posthuman formation in the conditions of societies’ techologization and informatization.The aim setting necessitates attaining the following research objectives: to consider the processes of posthuman formation; to analyse the nature of the scientific and technological revolution’s deployment and its influence on the formation of the man’s modern type; to reveal the peculiarities of introducing the scientific and technological achievements in all spheres of societies’ vital activity as well as its consequences for human development. Materials and methods . The research materials were represented by different approaches of both national and Western researchers regarding a new stage of the scientific and technological revolution, which, in fact, creates conditions for the posthuman’s emergence and development. A wide range of philosophical and general scientific methods of research was used in the work including metaphysical, dialectical and phenomenological methods as well as generalization, comparative analysis, system analysis and others. The research results. It is an undeniable fact that the modern man can not imagine their life without technology and gadgets. And this creates one of the main requests and tasks for humanity – that is to create a balance of the interaction between the man and technology, to find out the ways for people to conquer the consequences of the technical development. In our opinion, it is worth starting with the organization of our own behavior, which if necessary has to include interconnection with the nature, with other people, and so on. Conclusion. The consequences of such artificially created disparity will be unprecedented because earlier, despite all the differences, people were united by one important factor – they belonged to the same species of Homo Sapiens. Now then the mankind will be divided into two species. The posthuman’s emerging can destroy the whole system of liberal democracy currently existing in the west countries which basis, for example, is formed by natural rights concept implying that people are born equal in rights and are endowed with rights by birth. But this idea will lose its meaning as soon as the first posthuman appears. It is natural to ask the question whether people will share the general human nature if being divided into some species. During the earlier historical stages of development, the man just managed to overcome the disparity which had prevailed for almost the entire previous history. Nowadays the man risks ending up in a more unfair world than ever before. These dangers are caused by accelerated development of biotechnologies and their introducing into all spheres of human activity. Therefore, the consequences of the cultural and anthropological crisis the modern mankind is experiencing now are threatening and even disastrous for the existence and development of the individual. Indeed, the emergence of the posthuman is not a long-term prospect. We are witnessing the onset of posthuman. Technology gradually and steadily is replacing human. The mankind has to find a balance of human-technology interaction to survive as a species as well as to encourage and develop their human features. Since the man’s transformation into the posthuman would rather describe the death of human (in the traditional sense, an emotionally and spiritually-defined, natural and social creature). It would also imply dehumanization and replacement of value orientations and models on technologies rather than human improving

The Post-Human Turn of Accounting: Capital Market Efficiency with the Rise of Robo-Trading

It is the objective of this report to encourage accounting researchers to undertake further analysis concerning: 1. The significance of the adoption of robo-trading to market efficiency. There is a depth of research on robo-trading and market efficiency from computer scientists and engineers, but in many cases, these results are orthogonal to results from finance and accounting capital markets researchers. Three findings discussed in this study are: 1) that the ‘many eyes’ of the strategies triggered by robo-trading algorithms may result in crowd trends outside of the trading rationality triggered by each algorithm. 2) contrary to the aspirations of regulatory entities, ‘dark’ unregulated markets may demonstrate more efficiencies than more regulated markets. 3) care has to be exercised with the diverse meaning of the term ‘efficient’ in reported findings of a range of studies, as the meanings diverge. 2. What accounting should we teach our students and for which environment are we preparing our students when they leave university and step into employment which is completely computer-based? One certainty here is that double entry retains a core relevancy in both cloud and block-chain computing. As described by Rosi Braidotti “Post-human embodiment is written into the cash-nexus: cyberspace is a highly contested social space that exists parallel to increasingly complex social realities. The clearest exemplification of the social powers of these technologies is the flow of money through computer-governed stock exchanges that always work and never sleep, the world over. This flow of pure data spells the decline of the master narratives of modernism. The post-human turn of accounting offers an almost boundless expansion of accounting research into different worlds of meanings, predictabilities and rationalities of the sense-creating algorithms of robo-trading. And getting our graduates best-prepared for a new world of post-human accounting also merits on-going accounting education research and a considerable rethink by professional bodies.

Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory

The post-human turn in political theory has challenged the anthropocentric assumption that individuated human agency is the exclusive domain of political action, subjectivity, and community. Recently, there has emerged an important intersection between, on one hand, the “post-human turn” in political theory and, on the other hand, the critical studies of neoliberal governance and ideology, which define the contemporary historical moment in terms of the late capitalist monitoring, regulation, and exploitation of biological life of populations. In this context, the post-human turn in political theory has meant the extension of focus from human agency to include animals, plants, inanimate objects, and machines. Focusing on the work of Catherine Malabou, Maurizio Lazzarato, Brian Massumi, Brad Evans, and Julian Reid, I discuss some of the problems that arise from the attempt at non-anthropocentric theorizing of politics, including what it means—theoretically, politically, and epistemologically—to consider biological and machinic units in terms of political agency. I suggest that the problems encountered by these post-humanist contributions to the field of political theory are epistemological, analytical, and political. I focus in particular on whether the non-anthropocentric refiguring of politics offers new critical insights into, and resistances against, neoliberal governance. Bhandar B and Goldberg-Hiller J (eds) (2015) Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Evans B and Reid J (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lazzarato M (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (trans J D Jordan). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Massumi B (2014) What Animals Teach us about Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Posthumanism as research methodology: inquiry in the Anthropocene

The posthuman turn has radically–and rapidly–shifted what is possible in research methodology. In response, my aim in this conceptual paper is to suggest entry points into posthuman educational research methodology. I outline aspects of posthumanism while recognizing its multiplicity: there are many posthumanisms and each offers different twists, turns, and ways of thinking about methodology. In unfolding the potentials thereof, I locate posthumanism within our current epoch, which some scholars have suggested be renamed the Anthropocene to account for the impact of humanity on the planet. Then, I describe how posthumanism situates, processes, and affirms knowledge in interconnected and material contexts. Next, I consider how non-representational research imagines and animates methodologies that think differently. I conclude by discussing a postdisciplinary future for more-than-critical inquiries. Significantly, this article addresses recent advancements in posthuman research and engages with ongoing theoretical, methodological, and ethical debates.

TRANS ANIMISMS

This article examines a handful of recent creative works that reflect speculatively on transgender pasts. I argue that each of these creative texts uses ontological interventions to reimagine moments in trans activist history that scholars have narrated only in terms of the attenuation of sociality and of political participation. These works do this by ratifying trans activists’ relations of reciprocity with extraordinary entities that are not often supported by secular and anthropocentric historiographies. Instead of engaging accounts of coalition work with extraterrestrials, nonhuman animals, and magical powers mainly as sites of “subjugated knowledges” (a reading that negates the agency of nonhuman beings and analyzes them only as effects of human belief), these creative works all consider the political capacitations afforded by trans collaborations with other-than-human agencies. In order to make this argument, I draw from the recent body of anthropological scholarship known as the “new animism,” and consider the absence of commentary on religion and secularism within the Anglo-American posthuman turn. Ultimately, beyond offering alternatives to historical declension narratives about trans activism, these works urge scholars to consider how relations with “subaltern” agentive forces have become increasingly important to disenfranchised communities’ efforts to negotiate the political debilitations of a post-neoliberal world.