Posthumanist Education

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Empathy at Play:Embodying Posthuman Subjectivities in Gaming

In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avatar and player. We draw on a particular line of posthumanist theory associated closely with the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles that suggests a constantly permeable, fluid and extended subjectivity, displacing the boundaries between human and other. In doing so, we propose a posthuman concept of empathy in gameplay, and we apply this concept to data from the first author’s 18-month ethnographic field notes of gameplay in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Exploring these data through our analysis of posthuman empathy, we demonstrate the entanglement of avatar–player, machine–human relationship. We show how empathy allows us to understand this relationship as constantly negotiated and in process, producing visceral reactions in the intra-connected avatar–player subject as well as moments of co-produced in-game action that require ‘affective matching’ between subjective and embodied experiences. We argue that this account of the avatar–player relationship extends research in game culture, providing a horizontal, non-hierarchical discussion of its most necessary interaction

Rethinking construction expertise with posthumanism

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Construction Management and Economics on 14th January 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01446193.2015.1122201.Expertise is commonly understood to be a distinct, even defining, aspect of being human – an attribute related to our efficacies to come to know and influence the, mostly nonhuman, world around us. In construction, expertise is commonly defined as the acquisition of skill and knowledge related to new technical processes, organizational routines, health and safety codes, even cultural norms. Despite the development of rule-following ‘expert systems’ in construction and beyond, the proposal that nonhuman technologies and artefacts can share our expertise is thus to be regarded with doubt: humans are human because of their lived expertise to undertake tasks faster and better than machines and other nonhumans. Increasingly, however, this anthropocentric view of expertise can be challenged by a ‘posthuman turn’ that is gathering pace across the social sciences and humanities. In this paper I evaluate, via the work of four seminal posthuman thinkers, the distinct, and varied, contribution that posthumanism might make to how we understand notions of construction expertise. In so doing I draw upon fictional examples of construction practices to illustrate the challenge and theoretical and practical opportunities in rethinking construction expertise via posthumanism

Mapping the absence : A theological critique of posthumanist influences in marketing and consumer research

In this study, we critically examine the ongoing adoption of various posthumanist influences into the fields of marketing and consumer research from a theological perspective. By conducting a theological-historical assessment, we propose that it is not posthuman notions of human/technology relations, nor their broader context in the emerging non-representational paradigms, that mark radically new disruptions in the continuing restructuring of the disciplines of marketing and consumer research. Instead, we argue that what is taking place is an implicit adherence to a contemporary form of age-old Christian dogma. As a radical conjecture, we thus propose that an identification of certain similarities between Christian dogma and the grounds for various posthumanist frameworks suggest that posthuman thought may well herald the global dissemination of a far more elusive, authoritarian, and hegemonic system than that which posthumanists typically claim to have abandoned. Consequently, we elaborate on implications to developments in marketing thought.Peer reviewe

Evaluation of concepts for a NET plasma exhaust clean-up system

Copy held by FIZ Karlsruhe; available from UB/TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman