The Logic of Posthuman Inquiry: Affirmative Politics, Validity, and Futurities

Abstract

Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs familiar forms of inference and is also forwarding a distinctive array of inferential practices that until now have not been commonly present in mainstream/whitestream social sciences. Attending to the logic of emerging posthumanist empiricism can help clarify the affirmative ethics and politics of posthumanist inquiry. This essay offers that a modal, dialethic, paraconsistent logic of action is more suited to posthumanist inquiry than a classical logic of representation. This logic of action locates validity not with the accuracy of representations, but in the specific character of the futurities enabled and disabled by the ontologically generative action of inquiry. Implications for an axiology of posthumanist empiricism are explored.

Akokisa River Pedagogies

“…Abandoning the reliefs of stable and predictable knowability gained through human rationality justifying domination via industrialisation, violence, and colonisation is humbling, disorienting, and unsettling. Such discomfort also signals the possibilities of processional becoming and the generating of difference as the instability as the principle of the excluded middle can no longer be contained, causing subject/object relational indeterminacy (Pratt & Rosiek 2023).…”

“…). However, first-wave new materialism and posthumanist theories on which this essay relies have erased non-European, relational ontologies (Byrd 2011;Sundberg 2014;Todd 2015Todd , 2016King 2017;Ravenscroft 2018;Rosiek et al 2020;Pratt & Rosiek 2023). Faz's work and thinking are grounded in Indigenous materialism and spiritualism, which predates posthumanism and new materialist theories.…”

The Vitality of the Binary Gender Norm: The Entanglements of Wine Production, Biosociocultural Indicators, Reggaeton, Masculinities, Normality in Schools, and Water Management

“…To rephrase something we already know, the BGN is defined as the well-recognized and widely approved binary that dictates radical, oppositional, and uncontested differences between men and women; as such, it validates and promotes the complementarity between them, and as a consequence, it normalizes the "either/or" place to occupy within that binary (Butler 1993(Butler , 2006(Butler , 2019(Butler , 2020Connell 2020;Fox and Alldred 2015;McCoy 2012;Pratt and Rosiek 2023;Puar 2012;Prügl 2020;Richardson 2013;Ridgeway 2011;St. Pierre 2019, 2021.…”