Search

This paper systematises the theoretical perspectives that inform the consumer-object relationship (C-OR) debate and its evolutionary trajectories to organise how a theory of the object has been developed in marketing and consumer research. We build on a diachronic critical reading of the key turning points in the debate to conduct a systematic review, combining a bibliometric and semantic-lexicographic analysis. Our analysis organises the contribution that each theoretical perspective offered to the development of a theory of the object, highlighting the interplays, contrasts, mesh-ups, and distinctions in terms of theoretical underpinnings, vocabularies, and ideological viewpoints. In so doing, it raises awareness about the significance of embracing diverse theoretical perspectives to guide further inquiry on the expanding role of smart and technological objects in C-OR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment complements Thompson's comment on Belk 2024 in this journal. It suggests the selves Thompson and Belk refer to are both unusual and more fragile to impending changes in praxeomorphology than either author supposes. Hybrid praxeomorphologies fortend hybrid selves that may be other than the gnostic selves these authors imagine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use posthumanism and autotheory to materialize the gendered, racialized and sexualized hair/her/stories of British-Muslim schoolgirls in my study. As an act of feminist indiscipline and a feminist transdisciplinary innovative practice, I entangle with those affective, material, embodied and embedded encounters and stories that grow, escape, flow and glow with the vital materiality of hair and her stories. Hair, as one of the transgressive data of my PhD research, emerged in various temporal, spatial and material contexts throughout our research encounters. Considering hair as having posthuman agency, I argue how it can enable different material relations in everyday lived experiences of Muslim schoolgirls with hijab, body, educational environments and practices. Inspired by the notion that theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin what I call Posthumanist autotheory, has emerged from the body-theory encounters. I use posthumanist autotheory to materialize how hair as the ‘auto’ and the more-than-human agency in autotheory grows and becomes matter, method and theory. In using posthumanist autotheory as a feminist transdisciplinary innovative and speculative affirmative approach, this paper hopes to enable knowledge shifts in participatory researching on gendered and racializing assemblages to those everyday ordinary economic, institutional, biological and medical matters and assemblages that constitute racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis is a conversation with my home garden and a narrative of myself as a gardener striving to maneuver the familiar, insensitive illusion of totality conveyed in the phrase ‘my garden’. Arguing for a critique of anthropocentrism, individualism, and modern knowledge-making practices that reinforce subjectivities of detachment and human-centered exceptionality, this work draws from Bruno Latour’s development of a politics and science for ‘coming down to Earth’ in order to advocate for a conception of learning that could move the human position toward Latour’s notion of the Earthbound and foster terrestrial kinship. While the divergent rhythms of the garden make the emerging subject tangible, they also hint at worlds beyond the human. Dwelling with these unfamiliar rhythms and ‘learning with’ them involves instances where the knowable ‘I’ momentarily becomes dis-/re-placed. By probing learning through the limits of relationality and conventional knowing, this article contributes to ongoing re-theorizations of the place of humans among others within environmental education research. It invites educators to consider how embracing the limits of human knowing and attuning to the diverse rhythms of the land might be put into practice, for example, through school gardens, to foster learning that brings us closer to Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time, requiring significant responses from all aspects of society, including education. The prevailing responses to climate change tend towards treating the crisis as a predominantly scientific and managerial issue that requires technological solutions or behaviour changes. Correspondingly, climate change education (CCE) often focuses on teaching climate science and (predominantly individual) behaviour change. We argue that CCE, as part of a broader environmental and sustainability education (ESE), needs, in addition to a short-term damage limitation response, a simultaneous, longer-term, transformational approach that goes beyond critical humanism and engages with posthumanism. We explore ideas about human continuity with the more-than-human world, and the relationality and materiality of humans. Drawing on recent developments within posthuman pedagogies research, we consider how posthumanism might influence ESE/CCE, focussing on how two sustainability competency frameworks, UNESCO’s key competencies and the EU’s GreenComp, might be posthumanised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the concept of posthuman identity as depicted in director James Cameron's Terminator films, the film "Blade Runner," directed by Ridley Scott and the film "The Matrix." Topics include the coexistence of human and machine entities, the critique of traditional humanist ideals, and the evolution of artificial intelligence toward self-awareness and independence.

It is widely acknowledged that anthropogenic climate change is already having severe adverse effects on our planet and poses an existential threat to many species, including our own. National curricula and schools and other formal educational settings have been slow to address the issue of climate change, despite the deep traction that it has with many young people. This paper introduces the papers in a Special Issue that arose from a four-day residential symposium on how schools for 5–19 year-olds and other sites for learning should address climate change in both their taught and wider curricula. As an invited symposium of the Journal of Moral Education Trust, contributors were asked to pay particular attention to the moral/ethical/civic dimensions of climate change education. In this paper, we also emphasise that a key purpose of this Special Issue is to ‘own’ climate change education as an important issue for moral education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This narrative case study examines the multilingual practice and identity of Haben, a refugee-background Somali-Bantu in a larger one-year (2019-2020) ethnography with refugee arrivals in coping with new linguistic and cultural environment in a northeastern U.S. city. Framed by the entangled transnational-translocal approach to multilinguals, languages, and identities, this study finds Haben's African languages and English were acquired and used as resources for survival and thrival and weaponized against bullying and discrimination in his early and later life in diaspora. Haben's multilingual identity was (re)produced by the sociocultural and linguistic flows across national boundaries and his responses to local needs. This study indicates multilingual identity as a discursive spatio-temporal entanglement that blurs the boundaries between transnational-translocal, past-present, human-nonhuman. This study challenges deficit discourse that perceives immigrant multilingualism as a deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although automated translation has been available for decades in myriad forms, the implication of the current exponential advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) for communication in general and translation in particular is more starkly affrontational than ever. Although Large Language Models, of which ChatGPT is exemplary, were not specifically designed for translation purposes, they are attested to have attained a sufficient degree of technical sophistication as to generate translations that match or surpass dedicated translation systems in the market like Google Translate and DeepL. This impacts the modus operandi of communication and the self-concept of language professionals including, of course, translators. This article asks how translation as a field of practice can best respond to this development. It critically reflects on the implications of AI for the conception of translation, arguing that an alternative framing around the idea of distribution allows us to rescale translation toward broader competencies and conceive of AI as a prosthesis of translators' minds. The article advocates a posthumanist perspective on translation with a view to expanding its spectrum of skills, modes, and media as well as transcending the traditional personae of translators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research shows the absurdity of education, especially education management, in the posthumanist schema. Posthumanists seem to want to form their own group, but researchers see that posthumanism is not new, especially in the world of education. Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, in the framework of perennialism, shows the structure of education, especially in America, which, according to researchers, is relevant in Indonesia. Research findings are based on qualitative research with data retrieval methods from literature studies. Results showed that Mortimer J. Adler's philosophical thinking emphasizes the expansion of education management in both depth and fragility by and through learners, parents, teachers and related parties in the mecca of an independent curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hope is a theological virtue, and a great human need as well. In the Christian sense, it is an expectation of the ultimate fulfillment of human desires in God. In turn, the promises brought to man by technological development, which leads to the stage of transhumanism, where man in his human condition will be modified and even replaced by a machine, are a certain form of fulfillment of human hopes. In consequence, due to interference with its nature, the human body will become stronger, healthier, less susceptible to the effects of time, and resistant to injuries. Moreover, an expanded set of senses will enable man to receive more fully the wealth of impressions from the environment in which he lives. However, the promise of transhumanism does not fall within Christian hope, nor does it constitute the implementation of its goals. Instead, it stems from the boundless belief in the progress of man who is completely enclosed in a horizontal perspective. Christianity, in contrast, perceives the fulfillment of human hopes through a personal relationship with the risen Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only the incurious and philosophically challenged doubt the significance of dignity as a central issue in human interactions. Human dignity is much debated in religion, law, moral philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, philosophical anthropology, psychology, communication studies, and elsewhere. It is subject to competing discourses of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and logic. It appears in intercultural and international discussions of rights, autonomy, race, ethnicity, economics, war, and peace. It is contrasted with guilt, shame, and humiliation, both ordinary and extreme. However, the dynamic roots of dignity are usually presupposed or ignored in favor of reductionist typologies and antinomies. Returning us to lived experience and with post-humanist animal studies and the medical model of psychiatry as exemplary cases of reductionism, I interpret H. Plessner's semiotic phenomenology as a communicative philosophy of the humane in dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of neoliberal healthcare, nurses and other health professionals face working conditions that leave them perpetually feeling inadequate, as though they are not enough. They are consistently expected to achieve more with less resources. In such an environment, mere professionalism proves wholly insufficient, enforcing norms of altruism and kindness. Professionals must transcend this disciplinary tool and embody a 'more‐than‐professional' approach. This study, informed by critical posthumanism, employs three mythical archetypes—the Medusa, the Witch and the Siren—to illuminate potential avenues for resistance against prevailing trends in healthcare. Drawing on the perspectives of Hélène Cixous, Silvia Federici and Jacques Rancière, we introduce a process of resistance for healthcare professionals pushing back against the challenges of crumbling healthcare systems. Cixous' feminist reimagining of Medusa symbolizes intensified embodied sensory experiences, emphasizing the power of irony, laughter and writing in highlighting the daily struggles faced by healthcare workers. Federici's depiction of the Witch exposes clandestine alliances among healthcare workers and patients, akin to a pact with the devil, countering the individualistic, alienating approach to care provision and resisting neoliberal pressures. The Witch archetype embodies resistance grounded in creativity against the commodification of public healthcare. Finally, Rancière's 'politics of the Siren' offers a strategy for disrupting entrenched hierarchies from the underworld. Like Sirens, healthcare workers and patients can subversively transform their silence into songs of resistance, simultaneously operating from beneath the surface of accountability measures. Our intention is to showcase the emergence of posthuman 'professionals' who adapt by forging new modes of social relations in response to neoliberal constraints, straying from conventional, apolitical notions of 'professionalism'. Drawing lessons from mythical figures of resistance offers a fresh understanding of subversion as a catalyst for social and political transformation within the healthcare sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates on an artist-in-residence project funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the Geography Department at Durham University in 2015–16. The project confronted artistic and scientific perspectives to investigate how people in the North-East of England perceive and value their river environments and to recognize potential contributions to catchment management. The project identified a variety of disconnexions and hierarchies in the River Wear catchment and formulated artistic interventions for nonhuman audiences. This article reflects on water holistically and explores transdisciplinary views to propose water in its expanded field. Water in the Expanded Field is plural, complex, and aims at decentering the human importance. It promotes water multiple perspectives, including the more-than-human world and acknowledging water's ontological importance, developed by the speculative artistic practice of producing works of art for nonhuman audiences and then transposed to water debates. The article converges distinct evidence pointing to the importance of composting existing knowledge and dualistic reasoning to promote pluriversal ontologies of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper began with the assumption that the habitual practices of knowledge-creation, which have shaped the day-to-day contexts of teachers and researchers, are not greatly different from the practices that have led to human-made catastrophes in the Anthropocene. I pondered over my experiences as a researcher in an attempt to gain insights for thinking about and engaging in knowledge-creation differently to become more response-able in the Anthropocene. Inspired by post-qualitative research practice, I re-turned, like an earthworm, (to) two research events. A theoretical framework informed by critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism guided the process. Through these re-turns, I came to understand that creating knowledge is a complex and indeterminate process that always accompanies the 'more-than'. Attending to the notion of knowledge-ing, I discussed the ways in which knowledge emerged as a flow that was neither fully graspable nor static through more-than-human intra-actions. What I propose in this paper is not a methodological technique, but rather, a mode of practice that might disrupt our sense of Cartesian self. I offered some suggestions for teachers and researchers to reimagine the practices of knowledge-creation as a way of reinventing their subjectivity and responding to the damaged earth more responsibly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on an out-of-school youth participatory action research project to better understand both how schooling emerged and was challenged in a liberatory space. This project explores the entanglement of schooling, learning, and youth in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) setting. There were six youth and one academic researcher involved in the project which spanned two years, 2018–2020. This work was driven by the research questions: if schooling is a non-human agent, how does schooling manifest in an afterschool YPAR space, and how, if at all, was schooling interrupted/challenged? This project utilized ethnographic methods, interviews, cognitive maps, and posthumanist theorizing to explore the entanglements of human, nonhuman, and discursive agents. Findings illustrated that within the afterschool space, the participants were constantly in tension of holding to and pushing against those agents buttressing schooling – hierarchical relationships, adultism, prescriptive entanglements, and internally disciplining and surveilling themselves. When it came to the learning lines of flight that emerged within the YPAR space, participants created community by making and holding space for one another. The group rejected linearity and embraced the unpredictability of learning. By centering democratic collaboration, youth knowledge/experiences, and learning, the collective demonstrated how YPAR can be a tool of resistance to the dominating forces of agential schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Art Vision is the property of Ataturk University Coordinatorship of Scientific Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Advanced technological innovations changed every aspect of human life, including humanity's hope for the future. Current enhancements through technology predicted what would happen as humans found ways to increase lifespans, heal diseases, and lead humanity to breach somebiological limitations. Transhumanism was the hope that humans had not ended their evolution and that technology could help with more enhancements. Such enhancements included uploading the human mind into computer systems and enabling people to live virtually. The Church responded to transhumanist people and contexts and the possibility of reaching a posthumanism phase in humanity. The challenges for the church were establishing a theology to help people deal with technological innovations and examining the morality of transhumanists. The church also challenged the notion of a transhumanism religion and how transhumanists relied on technology for transformation while Christians rely on Christ for redemption and renewal of their minds and the salvation of their souls. This article suggests that the church has to be at the forefront to guide people in the coming days on the dangers of worshipping technology and viewing it as a creator instead of a as a useful tool at humanity's disposal. It also explores theological discussions along posthumanism lines that could help people understand the human-technology relationship and how to use it for maximum benefits. A literature review was used in this study involving researching, reading, analyzing, evaluating, and summarizing scholarly literature typically from journals and articles about this specific topic on the issue of transhumanism in Church missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With animal studies and post-humanism we notice and value the importance of animals in our life learning to take them seriously as a significant part of our ecosystem. We also try to teach children about the importance of animals in our ecosystem and eradicate any hierarchical relationships toward them. Children's Literature (capping intentional) can aid this process since so many picturebooks novels and other texts written for children and young adults have animals as main characters or focalizers. Therefore ecocriticism complements the study of animal characters in Children's Literature. However in the case of dogs in Iran in primary sources or school textbooks published for Iranian children this is rarely possible. The problem is that based on the Islamic doctrine that dogs are "impure" if one is a faithful believer one is not supposed to keep them inside the house. So based on this hierarchical ideology books with dog characters as pets living indoors are censored. This article discusses the treatment of dogs over the centuries in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the processes of disability disclosure, cripped experiences and a particular theoretical flight with posthuman subjectivity. The article critiques disability disclosure for coercively reifying cripped experiences into normative narratives. Moreover, disclosures determine coercive and performative regimes in educational contexts, where disciplinary power defines possible experiences for cripped folks. Drawing on Foucault's and Butler's works to ground our conversations of reification and coercion, I then pull on and complement Deleuze and Guattari's works to argue that disclosure places the nonsensicality of disability outside conventional determinations of sense, defining the cripped being as nonbeing to maintain the productive boundaries of sense/nonsense. Finally, I play with crippedness that refuses definition and disclosure as a posthuman subjectivity that celebrates fluidity, multiplicity and nonsense. My final section of the article offers a cripped path where the disabled, posthuman subject resists sense‐making and embraces multiplicity, fluidity and nonsensicality as a particularly embodied refusal. This article critically explores the reifying nature of disclosure while envisioning possibilities where crip and posthuman studies converge, promising a shift towards imagining posthuman subjects that honour the nonsensical and multiplicitous nature of cripped experiences that refuse disclosure/definition qua reification, coercion and sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at both Miriam Halahmy's historical novel for children, The Emergency Zoo, set during several days of mass pet culling in London prior to World War II and Hilda Kean's published research on the somewhat conveniently forgotten phenomenon, entitled The Great Dog and Cat Massacre. In both these works we observe the strong connection between child and pet, emphasised all the more in a period of uncertainty brought on by impending conflict. The reader is also presented with a detailed exploration of the child's worldview as compared to that of the adults' largely hierarchical humanistic perceptions, a way of thinking which is taken as one of the key contributory causes of the terrible pet cull of 1939. Comparisons are then drawn with the treatment of the child–animal relationship and that of household pets during the current Russo-Ukrainian War (the largest European conflict since World War II) as broadly represented in newspaper articles and photographic reports. These reports not only recognise the importance of the child–animal relationship (especially in terms of alleviating trauma and providing a sense of well-being) but also demonstrate that animals are both perceived as refugees and rightly given refugee status. Through an analysis of the strong contemporary media focus on the child and animal refugee, along with the comparison drawn with both Halahmy's novel and Kean's historical study, the article concludes that there is clear evidence showing that more recent perceptions of the child–animal relationship and the improved status of pets have been specifically shaped by both posthumanist thinking and the various debates concerning the nature and consequences of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Internationale Neerlandistiek is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Posthuman discourse calls for a fundamental shift away from modern anthropocentric thought. This shift stems from the reflection that many of the problems in the modern capitalist world, including climate change, are rooted in anthropocentric attitudes and ways of life. Amid rapid climatic and technological changes, transforming our way of thinking is essential. This paper argues that such a transformation is possible through the exploration of new subjectivities that incorporate the other, transforming the self in the process. It examines how 1930s Korean colonial modernist literature illustrates this search for new subjectivities. Based on this exploration, this paper also concretizes the tendencies and problems in our society, particularly concerning technological fascism, through recent Korean fiction and discusses the significance of the literary imaginations of 1930s colonial Korean modernism in the posthuman era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes to read the classic cycle of Godzilla films (roughly, 1954–1995) using a posthuman perspective that makes its emphasis on animal, vegetal and mineral life. We will use posthuman and materialist philosophy to analyze hybrid monsters as part of new interdisciplinary studies about non-human agencies and their creepy potential. As such, we want to offer the first posthumanist readings of the Godzilla franchise, in time to celebrate its 70 years of existence and, in consequence, highlight how posthumanist the series has always been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning from Jack London's Martin Eden (1909), a famous American Bildungsroman, this article invokes Bakhtin's chronotope to better understand a contemporary cinematic discourse predicated on the cultural maintenance of the post-Enlightenment masculine subject. Tracing the development of the Bildung genre-as-chronotope across key examples of post-war and contemporary Italian cinema – Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – I compare Pietro Marcello's (2019) adaptation of Martin Eden with Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021). Where the latter's ending reimagines the conclusion of I Vitelloni, Martin Eden is the filmic equivalent of the modernist novel's deconstruction of the nineteenth-century realist novel's spatio-temporal and epistemological boundaries. And, where Sorrentino's alter-ego protagonist must leave Naples for Rome in order to succeed as a filmmaker, Marcello's intermedial evocation of Naples amplifies the book's paean to socialism while reproducing, in another modality, the failure of London's intended critique of individualism. Finally, in none of these films is the invisibly essential masculinity of the subject superseded by a post-humanist alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the ontology of performance remains contested between mandates of essential disappearance and essential persistence, the theories of performance's temporality remain underdeveloped. This paper utilizes a limit-case of performance criticism—Paleolithic cave art—as a means of examining alternative temporalities and ontologies of performance made possible through new materialist and posthumanist frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While biomedical paradigms may pathologize depression, there is much critical potential in disclosing the disposition as a more complex, material, and ecological entanglement. In this performance, I draw upon a method of collage to demonstrate how "plot holes" between critical autoethnography, visual art, poetry, and speculative theorizing help reflect my ecology of depression. Theoretically cohering the performance is geotrauma, which traces affective dispositions across deep time and space, rendering depression a condition of the cosmos. Content warning: this writing contains discussion of suicide. Anyone in need of help can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or SuicidePreventionLifeline.org. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher education degree programmes have a range of imperatives when preparing students for the multifaceted and complex role of becoming a teacher. In the field of Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Aotearoa, readiness to teach is one such pressing driver. It is important to prepare student teachers to develop a range of theoretical and practical competencies that will support them in being ready to teach. Yet teaching is so much more than a technical practice - it's a political act that occurs in a localised time/space. In this article, I rethink the concept of'teacher readiness' in neo-liberal contexts in Aotearoa. This article uses new materialist and posthumanist theories to challenge the neoliberal notion of teacher readiness as an outcome based on predetermined attributes and standards. Instead, I focus on how the concept of (un)readiness might challenge dominant Western Euro-centric and neo-liberal ways of knowing and being. It is argued that refractive thinking allows a nuanced and fluid approach to aspects of teacher readiness such as teacher positionality, identity, and pedagogy. Embracing (un)readiness opens spaces for imaginative, creative and deeply thoughtful practice with children. It also offers possibilities for a deepening resistance to the neoliberal discourses within ECE in Aotearoa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the intersection of bioart and posthumanistic perspectives through the innovative use of reindeer by-products, specifically reindeer blood, as a medium for artistic expression. Utilising an Arts-Based Research (ABR) approach, the research investigates the methodological, ethical, and cultural dimensions of integrating waste materials into creative practices. The project repurposes reindeer blood, an often-overlooked by-product of reindeer herding, to provoke ethical discussions on sustainability and cultural sensitivity within the arts. Experiments in the BioARTech laboratory transform reindeer blood into air-dried pigment, which is then incorporated into glassblowing and surface pattern design. These innovative techniques challenge traditional boundaries of artistic materials and prompt deeper reflections on human-nature relationships. Exhibitions across Finland highlight the ethical application of this unique Northern material, highlighting its cultural significance and promoting a reimagining of our interconnectedness with the natural world. Ultimately the study expands the artistic repertoire and advocates for more harmonious and sustainable futures through pioneering bioart practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew Fiala, Tyranny from Plato to Trump: Fools, Sycophants, and Citizens, 2022. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 256pp. ISBN: 978-1-5381-9806-3 (pbk) Alan N. Shapiro, Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction. Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism, 2024. Transcript Independent Academic Publishing, 374pp. ISBN 978-3-8394-7242-2 (e-book PDF) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iain Banks's first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), set the scene for a literary career renowned for playful transgressions of genre and form. The novel addresses the topical debate on human subjectivity by capitalizing on the Gothic and postmodernism, both of which demonstrate a mutual concern with human subjectivity with a distinctly anti-humanist slant. This study argues that the novel partakes in the foregoing debate through an engagement with a literary tradition inextricably entwined with the discourse of humanism, namely, the Bildungsroman or the novel of formation. Despite the novel's striking overlap with the Bildungsroman, the examination of its significance has been relegated to the periphery of scholarly attention. Accordingly, drawing on and expanding Linda Hutcheon's notion of postmodern parody, this study posits that Banks's novel is a postmodern parody of the Bildungsroman, which taps into subversive Gothic elements in its setting and characterization, which are the two cardinal constituents of the Bildungsroman, as its ironic catalyst in a bid to critique the status of Man in postmodern times. In other words, the novel reprises the tradition of the Bildungsroman with ironic critical distance, depicting the horrific disintegration of humanist subjectivity into posthuman monstrosity instead of his teleological advancement toward positive identity formation and social incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game studies' engagement with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty has until this point been used to produce an account of the experience of video game play. This article demonstrates a different orientation toward phenomenology, using it as a critical apparatus to articulate a speculative historical materialism and philosophy of interrelation that we call the after-human. Through comparative close readings of two video games that follow the end of the human species—Backbone (EggNut, 2021) and SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015)—we articulate this concept using the Merleau-Pontian concept of "flesh," or the simultaneous production of the subject and object, to levy a critique of (post)humanism and offer a futurist vision of solidarity through the intersubjective after-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age" by Glen Slater explores the intersection of C.G. Jung's work and the impact of AI and cyborgs on humanity. Slater argues for a synthesis between technology and humanity that values depth, enchantment, and the arts. He critiques the horizontal world of information saturation and the devaluation of the natural, psychic, and spiritual worlds. Slater also examines the role of postmodernism and the unconscious in shaping our understanding of reality and the potential loss of our authentic human responses. The article concludes with a call for a contemplative shift in vision that restores vertical modes of understanding and embraces timeless archetypal patterns. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the philosophical ideas of Hedwig Conrad-Martius and Edith Stein regarding the reality of non-human entities. Conrad-Martius's philosophy challenges the subject/object dichotomy and offers new perspectives for understanding reality. Her key texts, such as "Metaphysical Conversations," "Phenomenology and Speculation," and "Transcendental and Ontological Phenomenology," explain her departure from Husserl and Heidegger's approaches. Similarly, Stein's book "Metaphysical Conversations" delves into the essence of human beings and their relationship with other beings, introducing the concept of the Quall. Both philosophers emphasize the importance of recognizing the boundaries between different beings and the responsibility of humans towards the non-human. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers the ethical implications of the use of Foley sound in wildlife documentaries. Almost all of the sounds that animals seem to make in these films and television programmes are added by Foley artists; animals in the wild are often filmed using telephoto lenses, beyond the reach of microphones. Crew or vehicle noise will also often muddy sounds recorded on location and so a clean soundtrack must be created in post-production. This article is based on first-hand interviews conducted with practising Foley artists. It details some of the techniques that Foley artists use to simulate the sounds of animals walking, chewing, scratching or otherwise engaging with their environments. It then draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas to frame ethical activity as the act of encountering the other in terms which recognize and accept their otherness as such. I suggest first that Foley might impede such an ethical encounter with animal life because it seems, at first, to anthropomorphize the animal and to reduce them to a subset of the human. I go on to suggest, however, that Foley is also invested in representing what the biologist Jakob von Uexküll has labelled the umwelt of the animal – the animal's unique 'lifeworld'. According to this reading, Foley does ethical work in the wildlife documentary; it brings us to an encounter with the animal's otherness and intimates that humanity's own umwelt is but one amongst many. In this way, Foley reveals that the human perception of the world is neither objective nor universal nor absolute. It decentres the human in the way we conceive the world and ethically frames the animal Other as coequal with the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donna Haraway has been a constant presence in geographical thought and practice over the past 30 years. From her early and very influential essay on Situated Knowledges , to her more recent engagements with the Anthropocene in Staying with the Trouble , her work has become a key reference point for questioning the production of geographical knowledge. In this commentary I trace the influence of Haraway's thought on geographical scholarship, exploring how it both shapes our disciplinary histories and provides a critical lens upon them. In particular I highlight how Haraway's work informs feminist and more-than-human geographies, resonates with Indigenous ontologies and challenges geographers to reflect critically on the implications of their positionality and provinciality for academic research. • Examines the influence of Donna J Haraway on geographical scholarship over the past three decades. • Explores the influence of her essays on 'situated knowledges' and 'the cyborg manifesto' on feminist geographies. • Examines how Haraway's approach shaped the emergence of the subdiscipline of animal geographies. • Explores the synergies and tensions between Haraway's work and Indigenous scholarship. • Examines the implications of Haraway's work for how we narrate histories and philosophies of Geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the relevance of the history and philosophy of geography and provides a personal perspective on the origins of the Working Party/Study Group/Research Group by one of its founders. Intellectually, the paper identifies the role of its history and philosophy as the construction and sanctioning of meta-narratives by which meaning is conferred on 'geography'. Practically, the paper summarises the descriptive, normative and personal justifications for the establishment of the Working Party in 1981 in the context of Queen's University Belfast as a zone of civility exemplifying the politics of hope in a militarised, segregated and sectarian society. • The emergence of academic disciplines is a social and historiographical process. • The institutional evolution of disciplines is a function of serendipity, politics and context. • Descriptive, normative and personal factors shape discipline emergence and development. • Contemporary challenges require new modes of intellectual organising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecocritical writer-activists have recently focused on the difficulties of representing climate, its slowly violent changes, and the ways human and more-than-human bodies inter- and intra-act within it. Though contextually dissimilar, various Dadaist aesthetics and praxes are likewise critically engaged with the intersection of deeply complex systems and their violent effects on bodies. I argue that there are useful imbrications, previously unexplored, of the ecocritical theories of slow violence and trans-corporeality in the idiosyncratic aesthetic practices of Dadaism. The Dadaist focus on "making visible" the hypercomplex culpability of ubiquitous and otherwise invisible culture, the implicit critique of traditional visual hegemony within that culture, and Dada's use of photomontage portraiture to ironically perform the invisible and accretive violence of that culture with representations of human and more-than-human bodies productively align with recent ecocritical theories of slow violence and intra-active trans-corporeality. Dada can then be viewed to have distantly prefigured elements of these ecocritical theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses and elaborates on the insights gained from the teaching of a course in Environment, Literature and Culture at a university in the north of Thailand. The course was designed as an invitation to English major students to develop sustain-abilities (vulner-abilities, attend-abilities, and response-abilities). In an effort to overcome the anthropocentrism of traditional humanistic ecocritical pedagogies, both the course and this case study have been framed by posthumanist ontology and educational theory. From this standpoint, curriculum and pedagogy constitute a relational, open-ended, more-than-human entanglement of agencies, practices, discourses, matters, and encounters assembled in the process of teaching and learning. The dialogical and situated invitations of this course contributed to assemble a literacy situation that seemed to foster in students an embodied, affective, experienced, relational sense of becoming-together with nonhuman others. While it is unclear whether the participation in the course will continue to motivate their collective and individual actions beyond this literacy situation, the encounters and relations between these students and the many nonhumans assembled in the ecocritical classroom constitute by themselves bewildering learning experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of international education policy frequently take issue with how it stabilises neoliberal values at the expense of the progressive aims of education. Yet the humanism underpinning these debates can work to exclude environmental concerns from the remit of educational policy. This article offers a posthuman critique of the Australian Strategy for International Education 2021–2030 that does not take for granted that international education policy should be humanistic but considers how it comes to be affirmed as such. Through a discourse analysis of the Strategy and supporting materials, this article identifies three manoeuvres that affirm the policy as humanistic. Firstly, neoliberal values and notions of wellbeing are wedded together in a shared understanding that the Strategy must be student centred. Secondly, the Strategy reinscribes divisions between humans and nature by casting land as a passive backdrop for human activities. And thirdly, the Strategy makes a claim to perpetuity by linking the acquisition of human skills with a sustainable and prosperous future. The conclusion contends that international education policy cannot ignore the impacts of human activity on the world and must nurture the vast range of interdependencies that sustain life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how schooling – the oppressive, disciplinary force of much U.S. education – is a lively actor, with the agency to change in response to efforts to resist it. Using an agential realist account, the article traces how humans, nonhumans, and discourses intra-act to shape the ongoing power of schooling. The posthumanist framing decenters the human and affords the possibility of acknowledging the agency of more than human actors – clipboards, write-ups, resignation letters, schooling discourses, racialized discourses – that may not be accounted for within humanist framings. In doing so, it also offers a unique perspective on how efforts to challenge or resist schooling must take a broader range of actors into account, from clipboards and handouts to adultism and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author uses the lens of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) to analyze the concerns of the worker in the contemporary workplace and proposes both new insights and potential remediations through a post-humanistic leadership centered on practice. L-A-P is designed to probe underneath the accepted or "natural" human resource practices to uncover the power dynamics in the workplace that have led to challenges to the worker in the form of burnout, lack of autonomy, and detachment. After introducing the practice approach to the workplace, the paper interrogates the potential value of leadership being viewed as a collaborative agency constituting changes in the trajectory of prefigured work practices that can have affirmative consequences via its ethical and critical approach to human resource development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]