Posthumanist Education

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Performing the paradox: collaboration as intervention in Eis o Homem

After the economic crisis of 2008, Portugal, like other European countries, underwent a readjustment programme based on neo-liberal principles. This programme widened the gap between rich and poor and elevated the economic over the social, the political and the affective. This paper analyses the devised performance Eis o Homem (Behold Man) as both an artistic and intellectual intervention in this context of crisis. It suggests that collaboration between artists on an explicitly non-hierarchical basis functioned as a coping mechanism for both the artists involved and the audience. The material generated during rehearsals contrasted the powerful reality of life as lived by Portuguese citizens during this period with the Real, that, as Slavoj Zizek has argued, masked this reality with social discourses that emphasized that there was no alternative to the dominance of the market. It concludes that such forms of theatrical collaboration, which explicitly contemplate the right to dissensus, can lead to complex, transformative responses to social situations and to dialogically-informed performances

Characteristics of summer-time energy exchange in a high Arctic tundra heath 2000–2010

Global warming will bring about changes in surface energy balance of Arctic ecosystems, which will have implications for ecosystem structure and functioning, as well as for climate system feedback mechanisms. In this study, we present a unique, long-term (2000–2010) record of summer-time energy balance components (net radiation, R n; sensible heat flux, H; latent heat flux, LE; and soil heat flux, G) from a high Arctic tundra heath in Zackenberg, Northeast Greenland. This area has been subjected to strong summer-time warming with increasing active layer depths (ALD) during the last decades. We observe high energy partitioning into H, low partitioning into LE and high Bowen ratio (β=H/LE) compared with other Arctic sites, associated with local climatic conditions dominated by onshore winds, slender vegetation with low transpiration activity and relatively dry soils. Surface saturation vapour pressure deficit (D s) was found to be an important variable controlling within-year surface energy partitioning. Throughout the study period, we observe increasing H/R n and LE/R n and decreasing G/R n and β, related to increasing ALD and decreasing soil wetness. Thus, changes in summer-time surface energy balance partitioning in Arctic ecosystems may be of importance for the climate system