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In this essay, I explore and analyze Zora Neale Hurston's autoethnography The Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) as an alternative to the modern anthropological simplification of nature and the African American indigenous identity. Hurston's indigenous feminist subjectivity is focused on environmental sustainability and her resistance to anthropocentrism and racialized labor. Hurston's subjectivity as an indigenous feminist scholar can be articulated as minoritarian in the critical posthumanities since it is not about margin; rather, it revolutionizes anthropological discourse by re-signifying the African American lumberer identity and environmental sustainability in a robust, appealing, and unique manner. She reconceptualizes Black indigenous lumberers by articulating their historical and cultural relationality with the forests owned by forest industries in Polk County, Florida. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study qualitatively examines synchronous online encounters in Swedish teacher education, learning from the distance and hybrid mode triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, conceptualized as emergency remote teaching. The separation of bodies in such online teacher education challenges participants' sensory involvement and how they can be "present" to one another. The aim of this study is to scrutinize body-sensory dimensions of presence to enlighten online encounters in teacher training in circumstances of emergency remote teaching, as well as in contemporary and future online teacher education, generally. Online encounters were documented by video recordings during online seminars and lectures, and by diary entries and focus groups with eight teacher educators and their students. With inspiration from a posthumanist problematization of communication and post-qualitative methodology, the analytical process puts the concepts alterity and attunement to work with the data. Results show that online teaching encounters provides an altered body-sensory situation to which participants sensorily attune in different ways, bringing both positive, and troublesome affects. Different sensory attunements further involve exploiting some body-sensory dimensions (i.e. vision) when others are concealed. When performing teacher training of all levels through emergency remote teaching/online teacher education, awareness of how the material setting of online encounters affects the body and thus the didactic conditions for building meaningful relationships in the study environment, is important. Since the lived body has a key role in teachers' professional becoming, the study suggests a critical, creative consideration of its full sensory, along with further, qualitative expansion of online teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the figuration of the volcano to demonstrate the disruptive and irruptive power of post-qualitative research. The article's volcanic irruptions aim to keep data on the move, to show how data continually and slowly proliferate in rhizomatic, nomadic, and unforeseen ways via different, ongoing experimentations, instantiating the processual research practices of knowledge-ing. This article includes, and celebrates, empirical materials collectively produced as part of a collaborative research project entitled Get Up and Move!, which enacted posthumanist, feminist materialist research practices. We were curious about how we might activate the volcano to disrupt traditional modes of data collection, analysis, and dissemination rituals through research-creation events. By concept-ing with the volcano, through the creation of volcanic calligrams, we intra-act with data, as data erupt and irrupt in powerful, agentic, and surprising ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governmental politics in China continue to be a male-dominated arena such that Chinese women political leaders often carefully perform contested gender and occupational identities to negotiate a work-body (mis)alignment. Turning to sociomateriality, this study examines how gender and organizational paradox comes to matter as Chinese women negotiate the occupational identity of political leaders. The study simultaneously explores the types of identity work women leaders perform and the nonhuman actors they routinely encounter while working to make boundaries that outline the identity of political leaders. A thematic narrative analysis reveals the following: Suzhi work(s), guanxi work(s), and abject body work(s). Participants perform identity work constitutive of the masculine shapes/bodies of political suzhi and guanxi, while forming the abject body of a symbolic woman. Meanwhile, these bodies serve as working actors that move and touch participants in paradoxical ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this guest co-editors' introduction to the special issue(s) titled "Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry," the authors share the backstory to the webinar series, information about the webinars and how to locate the recordings, and how WEBing sessions with our (former) students came from the webinar series. A list of articles and article titles for the special issue(s) are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay men's anal fisting has been rendered in sharply divided terms through cautionary-toned medico-forensic studies or more affirmative queer commentary. Despite these paradigmatic and tonal differences, both have tended to share an analytically narrow humanocentric lens. Drawing data from a project with South African gay men who incorporate fisting into their sexual relations, a posthumanist performative account of temporality is put to work in exploring how anal fisting entails the co-participation of the often unacknowledged agency/ies of time. What emerges through this analysis is a peculiar and queer(er) temporality of slowtime which actively co-produces the corpo-erotics of gay men's fisting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ruminations on death recur throughout Job. Equally, language of the non-human world is prevalent. This article examines the coalescence of these tropes in the implicit "necro-ecology" of the book. As though observing the decomposition of a corpse, it focusses on four Joban images, each expressing human death in non-human terms: maggots colonise the cadaver; scavengers consume it. The body disintegrates into dust; plants grow and wither there. At each stage, the article shows how death and life are entangled together, the one requiring and enabling the other. Equally, beings are entangled with each other, challenging the human pretence to self-contained individuality. The article thus fits into a broader trend in the (post)humanities to cultivate scholarship conducive to multi-species flourishing, showing how Job provides fertile compost for symbiotic inter-species alliances of living and dying together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we adopt Barad's theory of agential realism to explore how power and performativity are simultaneously processual and ontologically entangled. We use the hyphenated term power-performativity to mobilize an exploration of how power is not an 'outcome' or 'effect' of, but an inseparable flow within, the processes of performativity through which the world is continuously becoming. This moves us beyond the traditional, anthropocentric take on the relationship between power and performativity which emphasizes human agency and linear cause-effect, toward an alternative understanding of organizational phenomena as always enacted through myriad intra-acting more-than-human actants. To empirically mobilize this approach, we explore power-performativity within online healthcare, enacted through personal online healthcare communities (POHCs). We explore multiple 'diffraction gratings' through which particular outcomes of online healthcare come to matter, while others are prevented from mattering. In doing so, we posit the suitability of Barad's agential realism for further explorations of the dynamics of power and performativity in modes of organizing and organizational life and offer tools for how these may be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic and family violence is a social and public health issue typically positioned in policy frameworks as a consequence of gendered social and economic structures. In this paper, we deploy an approach that draws on Hörl's neo-ecological thinking to propose that the home, as a site of domestic violence, can be usefully framed as an ecology of the domestic, a posthumanist hybrid matrix of bodies, spaces and objects in which various practices enact the smooth running of the domestic together with practices of domestic and family violence, including coercive control. Our interest is in coercive control and in the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on practices which enact this aspect of domestic violence. Our exploration of the practices that enact coercive control draws on the work of Law and others. We examine how practices, which are not compatible, or that do not cohere, are able to coexist in a domestic ecology and what occurs when there is a disruption as occurred with the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on a prototype event, A Recovery Arts Café, this article examines how recovery communities can be staged through collaborative performance events that directly engage with what it means to be in recovery from addiction. I theorise recovery and performance practice as particular forms of affective ecology, or processes of relation between the human and nonhuman, and challenge neoliberal ideas of self-care and 'good' citizenship. Drawing on posthumanist concepts of 'life-living' (Manning 2016) and 'making kin' (Haraway 2016), I identify how recovery-engaged performance events can operate as dynamic modes of growing resilience amidst societal contexts that impede capacity for recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of self-control and self-governance was unexpectedly shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic. Face-to-face encounters were minimized and social distancing was encouraged to avoid spreading the disease. The Finnish mainstream theatre machine began calculating economic losses with neoliberal logic. Self-employed artists, on the other hand, created “digital public spaces” negotiating new forms of digital presence and interaction rituals. This article explores the embodied experience of COVID-19 and how this new materiality can impact forms of performative and political sensibility. COVID-19 and social distancing are material-bodily processes which also have broader cultural, political, and theoretical consequences. These themes will be evaluated using a posthumanist feminist and new materialist theoretical framework.

Keywords: Black feminism; intersectionality; new materialism; warzones; quantum entanglements; posthumanist EN Black feminism intersectionality new materialism warzones quantum entanglements posthumanist 451 462 12 11/23/20 20201201 NES 201201 although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice. The Black feminist, lesbian activist Audre Lorde, explains the complexity of emotional intersectionality in the following way: I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together. Feminist new materialist, post-humanist elucidations of diffraction provokes a challenge to the emphasis in group analysis on mirroring as a frame of reference for understanding group dynamics ([10]; [28]). Farhad, I suggest that the absence of the Black feminist concept of intersectionality and disavowal of feminist new materialism and post-humanism is pivotal to you pivoting the centre. [Extracted from the article]

Through the analysis of several hypercomplex objects -- Mike Carey and Peter Gross's The Unwritten (2010) and Inkle's 80 Days (2014), as well as Doogie Horner's Die Hard: The Authorised Colouring and Activity Book (2016) and Chuck Palahniuk's Legacy (2017) -- the article demonstrates the challenges intermedial studies of texts without conventional profiles face. The argument presented here is that a careful hermeneutic analysis is needed to overcome these obstacles, despite the universal applicability of some media studies concept and a recent opposition against hermeneutics from posthumanist theories. The analysis of the examples unearths their aesthetics of hypercomplexity and argues for why facile categorizations of them would be detrimental to their interpretation. The conclusion suggests to draw more strongly on play within the intermedial discourse, both as a verb denoting autotelic activity and as a noun denoting inevitable or necessary imprecision, in order to engage with the intricacies of such examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how students’ voices are enacted in reform processes and in research on reforms. Our theoretical stance on the concept of reform is performative and onto-epistemological; thus, we understand reforming as an entangled multiplicity, co-emerging and co-morphing. Reforming reconfigure what ‘is’ and intra-act with what is already there. The article focus on a reform of the Danish primary and secondary school. We work with three different cases, each with a different data-set, and analyse how research methodologies and findings in the field of reform research constitute ‘the student’ and ‘student voice’ as well as we look into dynamics of how reforms shape and change what counts as voices and how voices change and shape reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we offer a new conceptual approach to analyzing the interrelations between formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental (ill) health with a specific focus on digital health technologies. Our approach builds on an understanding of public pedagogy to examine the pedagogical modes of address (Ellsworth 1997) that are (i) produced through 'expert' discourses of mental health literacy for young people; and (ii) include digital practices created by young people as they seek to publicly address mental ill health through social media platforms. We trace the pedagogic modes of address that are evident in examples of digital mental health practices and the creation of what we call therapeutic publics. Through an analysis of mental health apps, we examine how these modes of address are implicated in the affective process of learning about mental (ill) health, and the affective arrangements through which embodied distress is rendered culturally intelligible. In doing so, we situate the use of individual mental health apps within a broader digital ecology that is mediated by therapeutic expertise and offer original contributions to the theorization of public pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Academic, policy, and public concerns are intensifying around how to respond to increasing mental health problems amongst young people in OECD countries such as the UK and Australia. In this paper we make the case that public knowledge about mental health promotion, help-seeking, support and recovery can be understood as an enactment of public pedagogy--as knowledge practices and processes that are produced within and beyond formal spaces of learning. We explore the question of how new pedagogic modes of address are produced through digital technologies--social media, gamified therapies, e-mental health literacy, wearable technology--as they invite particular ways of knowing embodied distress as "mental illness or ill health." The rapid growth of formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental health raises questions about the affective arrangements that produce new kinds of (ab)normal in the digital era. Through a posthumanist perspective that connects critical mental health studies and public pedagogy, this paper offers an original contribution that theorises pedagogic sites within the cultural formation of public-personal knowledge about mental (ill) health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on universality in current human rights scholarship has been overly limited. Commonly, the idea is either dismissed as Eurocentric or it is compared to a global political consensus. I evoke certain alternate and underexplored views on the topic from literary and culture studies. Scholars like Kwame Appiah, Patrick Hogan and Seyla Benhabib have articulated principles that include patterns of non-coercive ethical thinking emergent across diverse cultures, particularly the way minority cultures ethically respond to oppression. I argue that human rights practices may be fruitfully guided by the way minority cultures around the world evoke ethical universals to challenge violations. To develop this, I consider Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies that treats the issue of colonialism in South Asia during the 19th century. Ghosh foreshadows the arrival of human rights in two ways. He shows that a conception human rights has origins in Western colonialism, precisely in the colonial idea of civilizing mission. But more importantly, he demonstrates that ethical universals allow colonized characters in the novel to form cross-cultural solidarities that subvert colonialism through conceptions of universal human rights. This understanding of universality is largely missing in current human rights scholarship, with consequences that extend well beyond Ghosh’s novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the sign of the ruthless SARS-CoV-2, the vast majority of traditional social structures seem to have collapsed completely. The institutions that form its backbone were forced to adapt quickly, to look for solutions that at least for democratic societies seemed inconceivable. One of these was the isolation of the population. However, the extreme measure forced the administration to make important investments in the world of computers, to be more transparent, more explicit and to exploit all the possibilities offered to society by new technologies. Suddenly, experts were faced with a lack of technological profiles not only in the field of medical sciences, but also in public administration. But the problem is not only purely technical but also human. It is imperative that a leap be made from the maintenance and upkeep of old systems to the training of highly qualified specialists in technological profiles who can understand the problems of public administration. Of course, not only in the administration. And all this because no matter how perfected the robot that will serve us in the posthumanist era, man is "stubborn" to remain the essence of planetary consciousness. It remains to be seen for how long. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]