This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of ...presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to reconfigure literacies as inhuman. We adopt Tsing’s (2015) art of noticing and present four ‘unruly’ encounters, touching surprising entanglements that e/merge when learning to ‘look around rather than ahead’. We notice entanglements of hand/writing, snow, flows of capitalism, mobile phones and a cardboard representation for our rethinking of literacies without assuming development and progress. Based on our analysis, we propose that moving away from identity, human exceptionalism and judging children on individual literacy achievement according to benchmarks that are external to the learning process itself renders learners capable in literacy practices.
This text argues that a number of recent works of contemporary art have developed an anthropomorphised code to signal “humanness.” Primary within this code is representations of labour, which the ...artworks connect to mimetic or realist stylisation as well as to the history of image production and often specifically Western art-making. It elaborates this thesis with regards to recent videos by Pierre Huyghe and Sidsel Meineche Hansen, and at a critique of social media labour in a lecture-performance by Jesse Darling, which all draw a link between human and non-human subjectivities and economic productivity. In focusing on different examples of nonhuman likenesses, the text also uses primatology to suggest that the colonial relationship between labour and species and racial hierarchies continues to colour representations of labour today.
This article highlights the fact that careful study of common posthuman outlooks, as described by Roden (2015), reveals three unique narratives concerning how posthumanists view the nature of ...humanity and emerging technologies. It is argued that these narratives point to unique frames that present distinct understandings of the human-technology relationship, frames described as the technology-cultured, enhanced-human, and human-technology hybrid frames. It is further posited these frames correlate and help map a range of ways people discuss and critique the impact of digital culture on humanity within broader society. This article shows how these frames are similarly at work in the language used by Religious Digital Creatives within Western Christianity to justify their engagement with digital technology for religious purposes. Thus, this article suggests careful analysis of ideological discussions within posthumanism can help us to unpack the common assumptions held and articulated about the human-technology relationship by members within religious communities.
This article presents an ethnography of the entanglement of space, learning and teaching bodies and pedagogical authority in a primary school in Germany. We focus on the spatial placement of a boy ...diagnosed with 'special needs'. Inspired by Carol Taylor's analysis of a male teacher's authority at a college. we describe the boy's changeable seating position first with de Certeau's spatial understanding of power relations and then with Barad's agential realism. By conducting this 'diffractive' analysis of his performances, we can show how he is subjected to the teacher's authority and has a remarkable authoritative power himself at the same time. Finally, by focussing on the relationship between the researcher and the boy, we discuss the process of data gathering as it is entangled with the interpretation of data.
This article analyses the role of plants in three well publicised Nordic climate fictions for young adults:
Memories of Water
by Emmi Itäranta, originally published in 2012,
The World According to ...Anna
(2013) by Jostein Gaarder, and
Bouvetøya 2052
(2015) by Lars Mæhle. Departing from the wider scholarly field of ecocritical theory, the study draws on the developing field of cultural plant studies to examine the role allocated to plants in these fictional depictions of climate change. The analysis is based on a quantitative counting and sorting of all references to plants in the analysed fictions. The aim of this exercise is to contribute to theoretical reflections on climate fiction (cli-fi) as a literary form and to say something about the kind of literary thinking with, and about, plants that currently informs (Nordic) climate fiction for young adults, given that plants are highly important to the global climate. While broadening the discussion of climate change fiction to include a consideration of plants, the article further contributes to theoretical reflection on cli-fi through its Nordic perspective. In dialogue with Adam Trexler’s work on Anglo-American climate change fiction, the Nordic fictions examined here display both similar and diverging patterns of engagement with climate change, something that highlights the importance of reflecting on the genre with reference to a wide spectrum of local literatures.
The recent use of gene editing technology (CRISPR-Cas9) in clinical practice revived not only bioethical discussions surrounding the potential abuse of the technology, but also the democratization ...processes when making decisions about how biotechnologies are to be used. Biological material and laboratory techniques have served as means of artistic expression for several decades. Using the examples of bioart projects, this article will present to what extent and in what conditions could bioethics penetrate the aesthetic space of posthumanism – including DIY strategies as a mode of transfer of scientific and technological knowledge to the public, while engaging the people’s participation in the decisions made concerning the future of the human genome.
This manuscript focuses on agency from a posthumanist stance. For so long, educators’ definitions of agency have focused solely on people. As we read more on posthuman ideas of agency, we were also ...reading Deleuze and Guattari’s work on philosophy and concepts. These two bodies of scholarship intra-acted with each other to create newness of ideas for us. In other words, readings on philosophy and concepts have helped us to better understand what posthumanist enacted agency is (or what it does). In order to think about enacted agency, we invited the concept of persistence(ing) to think-with-us-and-data-and-theories. Situated in a second grade Writers’ Studio, during a study on personal narratives, we found ourselves intrigued by a 20-minute clip of Katie-working-with-materials to create a 3-dimensional cabin as a way to bring her readers/users to the National Parks to which she travelled with her family. We invite the reader to consider: What is posthuman agency? Or more-than-human agency? How do you know when you see it happening? How do you go about researching this agency? Perhaps most importantly, why does it matter for literacy educators to think of agency as enacted between humans and nonhumans? We conclude by discussing several insights from analysis and why posthuman agency is productive for early literacy research and pedagogy.
Este artículo analiza una constelación heterocrónica compuesta por nueve figuras de horizontes y de nubes de polvo de la pampa argentina provenientes de la literatura y de las artes visuales de los ...siglos XIX, XX y XXI. Según se sostiene a partir de un estudio teórico de diversas fuentes filosóficas, las imágenes son nudos semiótico-materiales, espejos emancipados de la servidumbre humana y voces no antropológicas en los que tiene lugar una configuración estético-política particular del espacio. Las figuras de horizontes están organizadas en función del ojo humano y ponen el espacio bajo su dominio. En cambio, en las nubes de polvo en las que danzan y se conectan los existentes, la configuración humana se encuentra deshecha.
The author analyses the autobiographical film Orchids. My Intersex Adventure by an Australian filmmaker who was born as an intersex person. The text begins with the explanation of the symbolism of ...the orchid, which appears in the title and in many frames of Phoebe Hart’s movie. The film and critical texts are presented as examples of the dynamically developing concept of posthuman sexuality. The process of making this documentary film is considered in terms of an autotherapeutic journey.
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