What if middleness did not suppose progress?[1] What if, for example, instead of looking to discern a ‘premodernism’ and a ‘prehumanism’ that lead naturally to modernism and humanism and thence to postmodernism and posthumanism we imagined time as a vortex rather than a line? What if we abandoned human-centric narratives of history altogether, narratives […]
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As the era preceding the articulation of what has come to be known as humanism, the European Middle Ages offer a variety of vantage points from which to trouble present certainties, complicate contemporary narratives of what the human means, and set new trajectories for the future of posthumanist thought. The medieval period does not […]
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An enduring question about the human condition concerns the riddle of embodiment, or how to comprehend the very meat of our existence. Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, captures the quandary. It is 1632 in Holland and we are witness to the dissection of a criminal hanged earlier in the day. […]
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Donna Haraway famously pronounced, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” in her influential A Cyborg Manifesto.[1] This statement epitomises the myriad connections between the genre and posthumanism: entwined discourses that ask similar questions about what it means to be human and whether the ‘human’ should be the limit of […]
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There is an assumption that posthumanism, springing from advanced science and technology, will be far removed from the concerns of religion. Certainly there is a strong affinity between modern technoscience and a broadly secular, rationalist perspective in which religion and science, belief and scepticism, theism and atheism are regarded as incompatible. Despite this, there […]
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As a key component of compulsory becoming-human,[1] education has been viewed as a humanist project par excellence; often connected to a general idea of education as something inherently ‘good’, that can somehow make us become better human beings. While education policy, practice and theory have been preoccupied with knowledge development, relations and meaning-making around the […]
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