Feminist Posthumanities in the Anthropocene: Forays Into The Postnatural

Abstract

In the new planetary age of the Anthropocene or the Age of Man (as it were), humanity is cast as a single geological force, a major force of environmental destruction, and one folding in on itself. The Anthropocene is famously defined by human-induced climatic, biological, and geological transformations of our planet, by a profound anthropogenic environmental impact and mass species extinctions. However, the Anthropocene risk also, as pointed out by a wide range of feminist philosophers and critical scholars, to hide troublesome differences between humans, and also to hide intimate relationships between technology, humans, and other animals. This totalization of humanity is a parallel risk in some posthuman theorizing also, and something postdisciplinary scholars of the critical humanities and feminist philosophers have paid attention to for decades. In the posthuman context of the Anthropocene, I suggest and point to postdisciplinary humanities research and theory–practices that pay careful attention to the feminist theoretical work on our equally postnatural condition as an experimental remedy.

Glyphosate—A love story. Ordinary thoughtlessness and response‐ability in industrial farming

“…Soil organisms recreating collectively the soil eco‐system, nourish the plants that grow and ultimately the humans and animals who feed on them. Newly mapped microbiomes show that the sheer number of microbes that inhabit human and animal bodies including bacteria, viruses, protists or parasites exceeds the number of bodily cells by a hundredfold (Åsberg, 2017). Bodies and living soils are sympoietic (Haraway, 2016).…”

With shadows, dust and mud: Activating weathering-with pedagogies in early childhood education

“…The conceptual influences that run through this article bring together work from feminist environmental humanities scholars that challenges human-centred and progress-oriented approaches as appropriate modes of response to climate change (Åsberg, 2017; Haraway, 2016; Rose, 2015; Stengers, 2013; Taylor, 2019a), recent work on human entanglements with weather as a way of forging connections with wider climatic change (Neimanis and Walker, 2014; Rooney, 2018, 2019), and consideration of matters of concern and matters of care (Blaise et al, 2017; Latour, 2004; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2017) in developing ethical pedagogies in early childhood education.…”

“…It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up”, “to make cloudy”, “to disturb”’. For Haraway and others (Åsberg, 2017; Gibson et al, 2015; Instone, 2015; Rose, 2015; Stengers, 2013), the challenges posed by Anthropogenic climate change require us to respond. In these ‘mixed-up’ times, Haraway (2016) continues, one of our tasks is to ‘make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’ (1).…”

The kingdom of dogs: Understanding Pavlov’s experiments as human–animal relationships

“…Numerous disciplines including the humanities, biological sciences, and social sciences, increasingly address the relations between human and other forms of life more broadly, diversely conceptualised in and amongst HAS, ecopsychology, ecofeminism, Indigenous Knowledge, posthumanism and feminist posthumanism, multi-species ethnography, transspecies psychology, and much more (e.g., Åsberg, 2018; Gilbert et al, 2012; Haraway, 2016; Hustak & Myers, 2012; Latour, 2005). At the heart of this turn is a radical move, questioning the ingrained human exceptionalism of many intellectual traditions, and laying down a challenge to develop new ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies that can better incorporate human experience as entangled with animal and more-than-human worlds; to better reveal the contingencies of what it means to be human as something always in relation to and emerging from our relations to other species.…”