From countering the idea that “nothing could live in the deep sea” to exploration of the deepest parts of all of the world’s oceans, deep-sea mining (DSM) is the latest technological evolution in deep-ocean exploration. In this brief immersion into DSM, I discuss how a posthumanist new materialism provides a relational lens through which to […]
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In an interview published in 2015, Sylvia Wynter concludes her discussion of the history of Western humanism with the suggestion that “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis”.[1] This idea of humanness (and non-humanness) as praxis is one that critical posthumanism has embraced on multiple fronts, attempting to deconstruct liberal humanism’s […]
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No being today escapes being confronted with the fallout of human-induced environmental change, from ice capes melting in the Arctic, to Californian megafires, to reefs bleaching in Australia, disappearing habitats, and accelerated rates of extinction of myriad species of plants and animals. In the face of the uncertain future that unfolds in front of us, […]
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Working through questions of human/nonhuman similarity and difference from a critical posthumanist perspective involves rethinking concepts of meaning. Meaningful experience is widespread throughout the nonhuman animal world, ranging far beyond its iterations in human thought and language. There are significant differences, however, among forms of meaning-making, and these differences have to be accounted for within […]
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The interdisciplinary field of animal studies has grown in tandem with, but often in opposition to, popular and technophilic conceptions of posthumanism and the posthuman. The idea that ‘the human’ as we know it might be made increasingly obsolete by artificial intelligence has been around since the 1970s, when the literary critic Ihan Hassan […]
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