Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?

Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenue

Posthumanist Education

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Transhumanism and/as Whiteness

Transhumanism is interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to establishing its ‘algorithmic’ relationship to historical processes of race formation (or racialization) within Euro-American historical experience. Although the Transhumanist project is overdetermined vis-à-vis its raison-d’être, it is argued that a useful way of thinking about this project is in terms of its relationship to the shifting phenomenon of ‘whiteness’. It is suggested that Transhumanism constitutes a techno-scientific response to the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ at least partly prompted by ‘critical’ posthumanist contestation of Eurocentrically-universal humanism

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous by Erin E. Edwards

Review of Erin E. Edwards\u27 The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous

Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights by Alan Smart and Josephine Smart

Review of Alan Smart and Josephine Smart’s Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights

The unbearable trauma of being : death, hope, and (in)humanity in the work of Cormac McCarthy

For as long as the self-christened homo sapiens has roamed the Earth, various mythologies and their respective afterlives have followed without fail. Through the work of Cormac McCarthy, this paper seeks to explore the connections (if any) between mortality, hope, and the intrinsically human need for narratives of the afterlife. The term “after(-)life” is understood to denote not simply the realm that supposedly awaits us after physical death; throughout this paper, the after-life is also investigated as that mode of being which occurs follow a point of trauma, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or epistemological in nature. Three of McCarthy’s most pivotal novels (The Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) will be discussed in relation to the question of trauma, hope, and inhumanity, and what it means to be after the human experiences a distinct collapse in meaning. Finally, this paper endeavours to discuss such questions as “why this human need for hope?”, “how does hope persist in the face of inhumanity?”, and “is it this resilience that makes us human?”peer-reviewe

[Book review] Populism, Media and Education: Challenging discrimination in contemporary digital societies

Published in January 2016, this book is based on a recent cross-European research project, ‘e-Engagement Against Violence’ (e-EAV), which ran from 2012 to 2014 and included research partners from seven EU member states. The project comprised two separate research strands, which are reflected in the structure of the book. First, a discursive approach known as Critical Frame Analysis was used in order to analyse populist communicative strategies online. For clarity, Ranieri sets out the definition of populism as used by the project as “an explorative concept to systematically analyse the ‘discursive strategies’ of ‘othering’ through which right-wing organisations construct and locate the ‘others’ ‘out of the people’ by making them objects of discrimination and exclusion” (Ranieri, 2016, p. 2). In contrast, the second part of the project involved an action research-based approach to design, implement and evaluate media literacy education practices, to improve young peoples’ awareness of the issues online and enhance civic engagement

A fragmentising interface to a large corpus of digitized text: (Post)humanism and non-consumptive reading via features

While the idea of distant reading does not rule out the possibility of close reading of the individual components of the corpus of digitized text that is being distant-read, this ceases to be the case when parts of the corpus are, for reasons relating to intellectual property, not accessible for consumption through downloading followed by close reading. Copyright restrictions on material in collections of digitized text such as the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) necessitates providing facilities for non-consumptive reading, one of the approaches to which consists of providing users with features from the text in the form of small fragments of text, instead of the text itself. We argue that, contrary to expectation, the fragmentary quality of the features generated by the reading interface does not necessarily imply that the mode of reading enabled and mediated by these features points in an anti-humanist direction. We pose the fragmentariness of the features as paradigmatic of the fragmentation with which digital techniques tend, more generally, to trouble the humanities. We then generalize our argument to put our work on feature-based non-consumptive reading in dialogue with contemporary debates that are currently taking place in philosophy and in cultural theory and criticism about posthumanism and agency. While the locus of agency in such a non-consumptive practice of reading does not coincide with the customary figure of the singular human subject as reader, it is possible to accommodate this fragmentising practice within the terms of an ampler notion of agency imagined as dispersed across an entire technosocial ensemble. When grasped in this way, such a practice of reading may be considered posthumanist but not necessarily antihumanist.Ope

Manifestations of the post-secular emerging within discourses of posthumanism

This paper discusses the concepts of posthuman and post-secular in critical theory

Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: posthumanist research practices for education

This chapter provides a theoretical and practical introduction to posthumanism to explore the challenges and opportunities it offers in reshaping how educational research is defined, approached and gets done. The chapter sketches the emergence of posthumanism in relation to the humanist legacy, maps how posthumanism reworks subjectivity, relationally and ethics, and produces new understandings of ontology and epistemology. The chapter considers the implications of posthumanism for educational research methodologies and draws on a recent example to illuminate how posthumanist research practices recast the empirical. The chapter proposes the practice of edu-crafting as a practical approach to doing posthumanist educational research