On November 28, 2009, as part of events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, gas survivors protested the contents of the report prepared by government scientists that mocked their complaints about contamination. The survivors shifted from the scientific document to a mediated lunch invitation performance, purporting to serve the same chemicals as food that the report had categorized as having no toxic effects. I argue that the lunch spread, consisting of soil and (...) water from the pesticide plant, explicitly front-staged and highlighted the survivor’s forced intimate relationship with such chemicals, in order to reshape public perception of risks from toxins. Chemical matter like sevin tar and naphthol tar bound politicians, scientists, corporations, affected communities, and activists together, as these stakeholders debated the potential effects of toxic substances. This gave rise to an issue-based “chemical public.” Borrowing from such theoretical concepts as “ontologically heterogeneous publics” and “agential realism,” I track the existing and emerging publics related to the disaster and the campaigns led by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal advocacy group. (shrink)

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn (...) upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care. (shrink)

A jellyfish surrounds a plastic fragment, merging the synthetic material with its body; a water agency poster warns of dangerous plastic bottle ‘fish’ in the Mediterranean; marine organisms take shelter on and under synthetic materials. These are the denizens of a growing realm marine ecologists call the ‘plastisphere’, where sea life and plastics meet. Building upon multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies interrogations of nature/culture divides and the practical work of classification, this article explores the indeterminacy – the very plasticity (...) – of the category of ‘species’ as it is engaged in seriousness and irony, with living and nonliving bodies. First, I draw on participant observation at a nonprofit marine institute laboratory in California to trace the travels of plastic-creatures through attempts to disentangle them in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Here volunteers sort tiny plastic bits from animal ones under the microscope, enacting material boundaries as they decide what gets counted as life (not plastic) and what does not (plastic). Second, I follow movements of plastic-creatures through public education campaigns, paying particular attention to assumptions about belonging and agency enacted with assumptions about whether and when plastic-species should or should not meet. I argue that the ‘danger’ of plastic relationships lurks not in associations but in the very categories used to know and live with forms of plastic and forms of life, in the kinds of belonging that emerge with kinds of materials, and in the failure to recognize the impossibility of their separation. (shrink)

A humanoid robot named ‘Sophia’ has sparked controversy since it has been given citizenship and has done media performances all over the world. The company that made the robot, Hanson Robotics, has touted Sophia as the future of artificial intelligence. Robot scientists and philosophers have been more pessimistic about its capabilities, describing Sophia as a sophisticated puppet or chatbot. Looking behind the rhetoric about Sophia’s citizenship and intelligence and going beyond recent discussions on the moral status or legal personhood of (...) AI robots, we analyse the performativity of Sophia from the perspective of what we call ‘political choreography’: drawing on phenomenological approaches to performance-oriented philosophy of technology. This paper proposes to interpret and discuss the world tour of Sophia as a political choreography that boosts the rise of the social robot market, rather than a statement about robot citizenship or artificial intelligence. We argue that the media performances of the Sophia robot were choreographed to advance specific political interests. We illustrate our philosophical discussion with media material of the Sophia performance, which helps us to explore the mechanisms through which the media spectacle functions hand in hand with advancing the economic interests of technology industries and their governmental promotors. Using a phenomenological approach and attending to the movement of robots, we also criticize the notion of ‘embodied intelligence’ used in the context of social robotics and AI. In this way, we put the discussions about the robot’s rights or citizenship in the context of AI politics and economics. (shrink)

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations (...) of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such. (shrink)

This article contends that the central principle of modern philosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise. Consider the powerful critiques of Kantian philosophy offered by Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, respectively. These two thinkers criticize Kant for opposite reasons: Meillassoux because Kant collapses thought and world into a permanent “correlate” without isolated terms, and Latour because Kant tries to purify thought and world from each other rather than realizing (...) that they are always combined in “hybrid” form. What both critiques tacitly accept is the notion that “thought” and “world” are the two major poles of the universe. I claim that this stems from the post-Cartesian assumption that thought and world are the two basic kinds of things that exist. The name “onto-taxonomy” is introduced for this view. (shrink)

Since the early nineteenth century a membrane or wall has been central to the cell’s identity as the elementary unit of life. Yet the literally and metaphorically marginal status of the cell membrane made it the site of clashes over the definition of life and the proper way to study it. In this article I show how the modern cell membrane was conceived of by analogy to the first “artificial cell,” invented in 1864 by the chemist Moritz Traube (1826–1894), and (...) reimagined by the plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer (1845–1920) as a precision osmometer. Pfeffer’s artificial cell osmometer became the conceptual and empirical basis for the law of dilute solutions in physical chemistry, but his use of an artificial analogue to theorize the existence of the plasma membrane as distinct from the cell wall prompted debate over whether biology ought to be more closely unified with the physical sciences, or whether it must remain independent as the science of life. By examining how the histories of plant physiology and physical chemistry intertwined through the artificial cell, I argue that modern biology relocated vitality from protoplasmic living matter to nonliving chemical substances—or, in broader cultural terms, that the disenchantment of life was accompanied by the (re)enchantment of ordinary matter. (shrink)

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of medical and spiritual quarantine, the 2014 ebola epidemic and Jesus’ temptation, are analyzed to show that the figure is inherently compromised – the harder one fights to (...) keep the other away, the more one becomes inseparable from it. Derrida's reflections on the reactions against deconstruction show that this desire for progress is always inherently conservative; Meillassoux and Jane Bennett are considered as contemporary examples. A deconstruction of corralation and the academico-capitalist forces driving these ‘innovations’ might open us to reading the never-simply-past text, and to the possibility of the event. (shrink)

Material Engagement Theory, which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In How Things Shape the Mind I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich (...) and extend that vision and discuss its application to the study of mind and matter. I begin by laying out the philosophical roots, theoretical context and intellectual kinship of MET. Then I offer a basic outline of this theoretical framework focusing on the notions of thinging and metaplasticity. In the last part I am using the example of pottery making to illustrate how MET can be used to inform empirical research and how it might complement new research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

The analysis focuses on the centrality of the mind and the mental, and their relationship with the notion of discourse in International Relations theorizing. While many forms of discourse theory ar...

This article seeks to entangle two current philosophic praxes: New Materialism, and Sensory Ethnography. Jane Bennett has become one of New Materialism's most prominent proponents since the release of her now-seminal text, Vibrant Matter in 2010. Due to the varied ground upon which New Materialism stands, Bennett's work will be looked at idiosyncratically, then pushed into the realm of the cinematic via an analysis of the documentary, Leviathan. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, this film was among the first (...) exemplary works to emerge from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, based at Harvard University. In striving for a revitalization of ethnographic film practices, the Lab aligns itself with similarly non-anthropocentric, and non-discursive, aspects of experience to the New Materialism of Jane Bennett. By placing these two contemporary camps into conversation, this article intends to r... (shrink)

The Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. (...) Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism. (shrink)

Responding to renewed interest in political rhetoric among contemporary International Relations –realists, this article advances three main claims. First, it suggests that tragedy—the dominant...

Humans, more than any other species, have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us. This ongoing dialectic has long been recognised from a deep-time perspective. It also seems natural in the present in view of the ways new materialities and digital (...) ecologies increasingly envelop our everyday life and thinking. Still the basic idea that humans and things are co-constituted continues to challenge us, raising important questions about the place and meaning of materiality and technical change in human life and evolution. This paper bridging perspectives from postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory is trying to attain better understanding about these matters. Our emphasis falls specifically on the human predisposition for technological embodiment and creativity. We re-approach the notion Homo faber in a way that, on the one hand, retains the power and value of this notion to signify the primacy of making or creative material engagement in human life and evolution and, on the other hand, reclaims the notion from any misleading connotations of human exceptionalism. In particular, our use of the term Homo faber refers to the special place that this ability has in the evolution and development of our species. The difference that makes the difference is not just the fact that we make things. The difference that makes the difference is the recursive effect that the things that we make and our skills of making seem to have on human becoming. We argue that we are Homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them. (shrink)

Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman is intent on ‘updating critical theory for the third millennium’. Indeed, Braidotti repeatedly stresses that the aim of her book is to develop an affirmative form of posthumanist critical theory which, by providing creative alternatives to current arrangements, will allow us to better face various contemporary socio-political challenges. This review essay argues, however, that the philosophical position which Braidotti's book develops is unsustainable, and that it does not provide us with the kind of basis for affirmative (...) forms of critical theory and political practice which she suggests it does. Specifically, it argues that her philosophical framework results in persistent theory/praxis inconsistencies and is therefore lacking in ‘seriousness’. In addition, it will claim that these persistent theory/praxis inconsistencies reveal that her relation to ontological verticality remains unresolved. (shrink)

We introduce the working concept of “affective arrangement.” This concept is the centerpiece of a perspective on situated affectivity that emphasizes relationality, dynamics, and performativity. Our proposal relates to work in cultural studies and continental philosophy in the Spinoza–Deleuze lineage, yet it is equally geared to the terms of recent work in the philosophy of emotion. Our aim is to devise a framework that can help flesh out how affectivity unfolds dynamically in a relational setting by which it is at (...) the same time modulated in recurring ways. With this orientation, this article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of situated affectivity and to the theoretical and conceptual unification of distinct strands of research from several disciplines. (shrink)

In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this (...) posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound, how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently. (shrink)

This paper examines the challenges to critical realism posed by the ways in which the original postmodern sensibility has transformed into various forms of anti-humanism, trans-humanism, and post-humanism. These transformations, largely growing out of poststructuralism, are reinforced by developments in psychology and computer science but also incorporate a new turn toward ontology in alternate forms of realism such as Object-Oriented-Ontology. This paper identifies what is new and what is old in these trends and argues that, while there is something to (...) be learned from them, some of which implicitly and even explicitly borrow from CR, the humanist orientation of CR continues to deserve defense. (shrink)

Timbre is simultaneously one of the most powerfully immersive and one of the most ungraspable properties of music and musical aesthetics. And yet there is no critical idiom to assess timbre. There are not even adequate words to describe it, nor is there a definition that is more precise than one ex negativo: timbre is “the difference between two tones with the same pitch and volume”. The synonym “tone colour” is synesthetically muddled: it is a visual metaphor used to describe (...) an auditory phenomenon. This paper analyses the double dualism that pervades the musicological and critical assessment of tone colour. First, timbre is either considered in an idealist way as the expression of the inexpressible, or in a materialist way as the manipulation of sound waves and instruments. Second, there is disagreement as to whether timbre does or does not signify anything more specific than this “incommunicable”. Timbral dualism, however, separates matters that are – and cannot be but – inseparably entwined. Timbre is both an unstable object and an ungraspable Thing: in fact it resides in the space between those opposites. A theory of timbre, therefore, has to be inclusive rather than dualist: timbre bridges the gap between material origins and immaterial effects, between the ontology and the phenomenology of music. In this sense timbre epitomises the idealism/materialism debates in music epistemology. I argue that an inclusive theory of timbre would have to be based on vibration and vitality. Timbre is a vibration of sound waves crossing over from instruments to our listening bodies; a vibrating theory of timbre can cross over from ontology to phenomenology. The aesthetic experience of timbre is active and participatory : hearing timbre is interacting with musical epistemology itself. (shrink)

Introduction to a special issue of the journal entitled 'Gilbert Simondon: media and technics'.

In this paper, we reflect on the concept of nature that is presupposed in biomimetic approaches to technology and innovation. Because current practices of biomimicry presuppose a technological model of nature, it is questionable whether its claim of being a more ecosystem friendly approach to technology and innovation is justified. In order to maintain the potentiality of biomimicry as ecological innovation, we explore an alternative to this technological model of nature. To this end, we reflect on the materiality of natural (...) systems and explore a natural model of nature, which is found in the responsive conativity of matter. This natural model of nature enables us to conceptualize biomimicry as conative responsiveness to the conativity of the biosphere. (shrink)

Humans are organisms of a creative sort. We make new things that scaffold the ecology of our minds, shape the boundaries of our thinking and form new ways to engage and make sense of the world. That is, we are creative ‘thingers’. This paper adopts the perspective of Material Engagement Theory and introduces the notion ‘thinging’ to articulate and draw attention to the kind of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through and about things. I will (...) focus more specifically on Creativethinging, or creative material engagement, exploring the importance of thinging for understanding our species unique capacity for inventiveness. (shrink)

Morphological Computation is based on the observation that biological systems seem to carry out relevant computations with their morphology (physical body) in order to successfully interact with their environments. This can be observed in a whole range of systems and at many different scales. It has been studied in animals – e.g., while running, the functionality of coping with impact and slight unevenness in the ground is "delivered" by the shape of the legs and the damped elasticity of the muscle-tendon (...) system – and plants, but it has also been observed at the cellular and even at the molecular level – as seen, for example, in spontaneous self-assembly. The concept of morphological computation has served as an inspirational resource to build bio-inspired robots, design novel approaches for support systems in health care, implement computation with natural systems, but also in art and architecture. As a consequence, the field is highly interdisciplinary, which is also nicely reflected in the wide range of authors that are featured in this e-book. We have contributions from robotics, mechanical engineering, health, architecture, biology, philosophy, and others. (shrink)

The problem we face today is that there is a huge gap between our ethical judgments about the ecological crisis on the one hand and our ethical behavior according to these judgments on the other. In this article, we ask to what extent a phenomenology of the ecological crisis enables us to bridge this gap and display more ethical or pro-environmental behavior. To answer this question, our point of departure is the affordance theory of the American psychologist and founding father (...) of ecological psychology, James Gibson. There are two reasons for taking this approach. First of all, an ontological reading of Gibson’s affordance theory provides a concept of nature which is non-dualistic, non-anthropocentric and eco-centric, but is not seen as an ‘intrinsic value’ or product of ‘human valuation’. Secondly, the affordance ontology provides us with a concept of nature which in itself calls for certain action and behavior. If we indeed face a gap between ethical judgment and ethical behavior with regard to the current ecological crisis, an affordance of nature could bridge this gap. Based on our ontological reading of Gibson’s affordance theory, we open a radically new perspective on the current ecological crisis and the responsibility of mankind with regard to this crisis. (shrink)

Using case studies from the Indonesian context, this article argues that the current truth regimes we now live by are always and already “hybrid” and that we need new methods for understanding meaning-making practices in an era of globalization and climate change than comparative approaches allow. Following the works of such thinkers as physicist Karen Barad, political philosopher William Connolly, and eco-critic Timothy Morton, this article develops the idea that an event-oriented or object-oriented approach better captures our hybrid meaning-making practices. (...) Not only that, but it also provides a lens through which to understand traditions as polydox and the rise of “modern” science as itself a planetary phenomenon. (shrink)

In the United States, interest in urban agriculture has grown dramatically. While community gardens have sprouted across the landscape, home food gardens—arguably an ever-present, more durable form of urban agriculture—have been overlooked, understudied, and unsupported by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academics. In part a response to the invisibility of home gardens, this paper is a manifesto for their study in the Global North. It seeks to develop a multi-scalar and multidisciplinary research framework that acknowledges the garden’s social and ecological (...) or material dimensions. Given the lack of existing research, we draw on the more extensive literature on home gardens in the South and community gardens in the North to develop a set of hypotheses about the social-ecological effects of urban home food gardens in the North. These gardens, we hypothesize, contribute to food security, community development, cultural reproduction, and resilience at multiple scales; conserve agrobiodiversity; and support urban biodiversity. They may also have negative ecological effects, such as stormwater nutrient loading. Because of the entanglement of the social and the ecological or material in the garden, we review three theoretical perspectives—social ecological systems theory, actor-network theory, and assemblage theory—that have been or could be applied to the multi-scalar and multidisciplinary study of the garden. We also review sampling and analytic methods for conducting home garden research. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities to extend the research agenda beyond descriptive analysis, the primary focus of garden research to date. (shrink)

In recent years new discourses have emerged to inform philosophy and pedagogy in early childhood. These range from various postfoundational perspectives to objectivist accounts such as neuroscience in relation to brain development. Given the variety of competing narratives, the field is complex and multifaceted with potential to revision early childhood pedagogy through varied paradigms and philosophical orientations. This special issue sought scholarship on a range of philosophical perspectives about early childhood education, particularly those related to issues of pedagogy. In this (...) article, we develop an argument for philosophically informed pedagogy to balance some of the psychological and empirical approaches that dominate the field. Based on the provocations of the seven articles that comprise this issue, we argue for greater attention to subjective and even mysterious approaches to learning that call for ontological orientations to pedagogy as a relationship rather than a response or an intervention. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

In this article I reconsider the issue of ?transfer? in education. Received views of learning transfer tend to rely upon a version of representation in which the world and the learner are held apart. The focus falls on how this gap can be closed; how learning can be transferred. A sociomaterial perspective, by contrast, puts learner and world back together, making each available to the other. Bringing the materialist sensibility of actor-network theory to bear and drawing on empirical data collected (...) as part of a small-scale qualitative study of the experience of graduate teachers when moving from education into work, it is argued that transfer, and by implication, learning, primarily concerns the practical and takes multiple forms: contingently composed of social, textual and material practices of knowledge production, learning transfer is a relational effect of the intersection of these practices. Empirical analyses point to the practice of two broad patterns of learning transfer, termed here the representational and the relational. Thinking learning transfer as performed through disparate agencies and practices challenges the self-evidences of perspectives on learning which characterize contemporary education. Here, learning is primarily seen in terms of the intrinsic capabilities of people, regardless of the object-dependent qualities of their learning and lives. This human-centricity raises significant epistemological and ethical issues which are addressed by way of a discussion of the embedded normativities and politics of the practices of representational and relational transfer. (shrink)

Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future thought, given (...) the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

"I have a tree, which grows here in my close, / That mine own use invites me to cut down, / And shortly I must fell it" (Shakespeare 2001, 168)—Timon's lament, which in Shakespeare's rendition occurs shortly before its utterer's demise "upon the beached verge of the salt flood" (2001, 168) beyond the perimeter of Athens, is an indictment of the nature that Timon finds unable to escape. Having given away his wealth in misguided generosity to a host of parasitic (...) sycophants, Timon turns misanthropic when his "friends" reject his requests for help in kind to repay his debts, eventually exiling himself from the city with the intent of sustaining himself on nothing but water and roots. Yet he soon finds that removing .. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

what is the ontology of planets?Our access point to this question is the ontology of planet Earth. Although the presence of life marks planet Earth as special among other planets, Earth shares a basic commonality with them – namely, its material existence. We take this commonality as a point of departure for our reflections on the ontology of both planet Earth and other planets. In this chapter, we ask for the ontology of this materiality of planets. We consult the ontology (...) of planet Earth as I developed it in an earlier contribution (Blok, 2019), explore the ontology of planets as absolute boundary of the natural habitats on Earth, and reflect on the opportunities and limitations such ontology provides for future human colonies on other planets. (shrink)

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in (...) person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present. -/- Edited for the State Of The Art Network by Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, Marietta Radomska and Line Thastum. -/- Produced and published by Bioart Society 2023. (shrink)

In ‘Situated Knowledges’, feminist science studies scholar – and, as will be argued in this chapter, critical new materialisms scene-setter – Donna Haraway (1988) reveals her own politicised ‘electroshock’ (578) therapeutic take on epistemology and what it means to create knowledge from the ground up. She builds her argument upon Marxist, historical and feminist materialisms, the rich tradition of feminist epistemology and, above all, Sandra Harding’s (1986, 1987, 1991) standpoint theory. Connecting the foregoing philosophies to the Foucauldian idea of power/knowledge (...) (Foucault 1990 [1976], 1995 [1975]) and a critique of disembodied, objectifying vision, Haraway conceptualises her materialist project along four criss-crossing axes, namely: ontology (theorising what the world is); epistemology (theorising about how to see the world as it is); ethics (theorising why the world is as it is and how it ought to be); and politics (theorising how to effectively change the world). It is in the thought-provoking assemblage of these four philosophical domains that Haraway’s eco-philosophy sets the framework for what this chapter describes as critical new materialist philosophies. (shrink)

Social robotics designed to enhance anthropomorphism and zoomorphism seeks to evoke feelings of empathy and other positive emotions in humans. While it is difficult to treat these machines as mere artefacts, the simulated lifelike qualities of robots easily lead to misunderstandings that the machines could be intentional. In this post-anthropocentrically positioned article, we look for a solution to the dilemma by developing a novel concept, “abiozoomorphism.” Drawing on Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of companion species, we address critical aspects of why robots (...) should not be categorized with animals by showing that the distinction between nonliving beings and living beings is still valid. In our phenomenologically informed approach to social robotics, we propose that the concept of abiozoomorphism makes it possible to transcend the strong ethos of biotism that prevails in both robot design and academic research on social robots. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)