Representations of the Post/human PDF Download

Author: Elaine L. Graham
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719054426
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This work draws together a wide range of literature on contemporary technologies and their ethical implications. It focuses on advances in medical, reproductive, genetic and information technologies.

Author: Scott Jeffery
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137549505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book examines the concepts of Post/Humanism and Transhumanism as depicted in superhero comics. Recent decades have seen mainstream audiences embrace the comic book Superhuman. Meanwhile there has been increasing concern surrounding human enhancement technologies, with the techno-scientific movement of Transhumanism arguing that it is time humans took active control of their evolution. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical system of knowledge to conceptualize the superhero narrative in terms of its political, social and aesthetic relations to the history of human technological enhancement, this book draws upon a diverse range of texts to explore the way in which the posthuman has been represented in superhero comics, while simultaneously highlighting its shared historical development with Post/Humanist critical theory and the material techno-scientific practices of Transhumanism.

Author: Artur Matos Alves
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848881088
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This electronic book gathers twenty papers presented at the 6th Global Conference Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction, which took place in the Mansfield College of Oxford, between the 12th and the 14th of July 2011.

Author: Bert Gordijn
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402088523
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
As we are increasingly using new technologies to change ourselves beyond therapy and in accordance with our own desires, understanding the challenges of human enhancement has become one of the most urgent topics of the current age. This volume contributes to such an understanding by critically examining the pros and cons of our growing ability to shape human nature through technological advancements. The authors undertake careful analyses of decisive questions that will confront society as enhancement interventions using bio-, info-, neuro- and nanotechnologies become widespread in the years to come. They provide the reader with the conceptual tools necessary to address such questions fruitfully. What makes the book especially attractive is the combination of conceptual, historical and ethical approaches, rendering it highly original. In addition, the well-balanced structure allows both favourable and critical views to be voiced. Moreover, the work has a crystal clear structure. As a consequence, the book is accessible to a broad academic audience. The issues raised are of interest to a wide reflective public concerned about science and ethics, as well as to students, academics and professionals in areas such as philosophy, applied ethics, bioethics, medicine and health management.

Author: Colbey Emmerson Reid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350301213
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Ever since TIME magazine's 1983 'Man of the Year' was the PC, we have been led to believe that our domestic spaces have been colonized by digital technology. Too little attention has been paid to the domestic spaces and inhabitants impacted by this, and critical posthumanism has been captured by a picture of humanity overly indebted to digital technologies and their largely male progenitors. By applying feminist theory to posthumanism, this work recovers the plethora of sophisticated human-technology mediations associated with the home and practiced primarily by women, the elderly, infants, the disabled and across cultures globally, challenging dominant, contemporary visions of a future humanity. Authors Dennis M. Weiss and Colbey Emmerson Reid look at various iterations of the posthuman and assert the need for alternative, feminist readings that emphasize different standpoints from which to assess people, places, and products. Chapters address the impact of posthumanism on design theory and look at familiar domestic objects, with different attributes from those typically affiliated with technology and the future, such as clothing, textiles, ceramics, furniture and wallpaper. They reveal their unhomely, extra-human qualities and offer a much-needed perspective on domestic spaces and practices, revivifying the home as a site of species transformation and pushing beyond traditional understandings of person, mothering, families and care-giving to highlight a range of critically-overlooked mediated materialisms and embodiments affiliated with domestic space. By focusing on the neglected intersection of the posthuman with the home and exploring domestic posthuman design, Designing the Domestic Posthuman offers a vision of a future humanity that retains identity, integrity and considers our relationship to others, to the world and things in it. This book widens the lens of critical focus in posthumanism, feminist philosophy and design and presents an alternative, inclusive design framework for the future.

Author: Stuart Fletcher Murray
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789627478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Disability and the Posthuman is the first study to analyse cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of technology and embodiment. Working across a wide range of texts, many new to critical enquiry, in contemporary writing, film and cultural practice from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan, it covers a diverse range of topics, including: contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics; design, engineering and gender; the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the representation of war and conflict; and depictions of work, time and sleep. While noting the potential limitations of posthumanist assessments of the technologized body, the study argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism as they generate dissident crossings of cultural spaces. Such intersections cover both fictional/imagined and material/grounded examples of disability and look to a future in which the development of technology and complex embodiment of disability presence align to produce sustainable yet radical creative and critical voices.

Author: Evi D. Sampanikou
Publisher: Schwabe Verlag (Basel)
ISBN: 3796543189
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The new reader presents an up-to-date collection of seminal texts dedicated to all branches of debates on Posthuman Studies: Transhumanism, Critical Posthumanism and Metahumanism. It includes classical as well as cutting-edge contributions to these debates. The Posthuman Studies Reader is an indispensable resource for studying as well as teaching key concepts, central claims and main arguments of contemporary debates in the field of Posthuman Studies. The reader includes texts by: Neil Badmington, Karen Barad, Nick Bostrom, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Jaime del Val, FM-2030, Francis Fukuyama, Elaine Graham, Donna Haraway, Ihab Habib Hassan, N. Katherine Hayles, James Hughes, Julian Huxley, Brian Massumi, Max More, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Stelarc, Natasha Vita-More and Cary Wolfe. "This Reader is a perfect guide to get into bleeding-edge philosophy."Nicolás Rojas Cortés, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile "The Reader can be used not only as a textbook in higher education, but also by all researchers and students in these fields as reference. [...] I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in these movements and those works from which excerpts are included in it."Yunus Tuncel, The New School, New York "Since Sorgner, Sampanikou, Stasienko and their colleagues, almost singlehandedly, are crafting and advancing this discipline through its forming stages, when they publish a book with handpicked canonic texts, it should be treated as a landmark."Carmel Vaisman, The Cohn Institute and The Multidisciplinary Program in the Humanities, Tel Aviv University "What makes the Posthuman Studies Reader interesting and exciting is the facility to have in one volume the basic ideas and essentials of transhumanism, critical posthumanism and metahumanism. The reader provides in a condensed version an introduction to posthuman studies for both academic and nonacademic audiences."Leo Igwe, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town "The Posthuman Studies Reader serves as a comprehensive guide and/or manual of an evolving and expanding Post/Trans/Meta Humanism discourse. [...] because of the clarity of organization by the editors and the highest scholarship of the writers, the collection was able to drive the interest of readers a notch or two higher."Joseph Reylan B. Viray, Polytechnic University of the Philippines

Author: Carmen Dexl
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030886042
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of ‘non/conforming bodies’, ‘fashionable bodies’, ‘passing bodies’, and ‘pioneering bodies’ that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.

Author: Zoe Jaques
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136674918
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
An investigation of identity formation in children's literature, this book brings together children’s literature and recent critical concerns with posthuman identity to argue that children’s fiction offers sophisticated interventions into debates about what it means to be human, and in particular about humanity’s relationship to animals and the natural world. In complicating questions of human identity, ecology, gender, and technology, Jaques engages with a multifaceted posthumanism to understand how philosophy can emerge from children's fantasy, disclosing how such fantasy can build upon earlier traditions to represent complex issues of humanness to younger audiences. Interrogating the place of the human through the non-human (whether animal or mechanical) leads this book to have interpretations that radically depart from the critical tradition, which, in its concerns with the socialization and representation of the child, has ignored larger epistemologies of humanness. The book considers canonical texts of children's literature alongside recent bestsellers and films, locating texts such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Pinocchio (1883) and the Alice books (1865, 1871) as important works in the evolution of posthuman ideas. This study provides radical new readings of children’s literature and demonstrates that the genre offers sophisticated interventions into the nature, boundaries and dominion of humanity.

Author: Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780936222
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
What does it mean to be human today? The answer to this question, which is as old as the human species itself, is becoming less and less certain. Current technological developments increasingly erode our traditional humanist reflexes: consciousness, emotion, language, intelligence, morality, humour, mortality - all these no longer demonstrate the unique character and value of human existence. Instead, the spectre of the 'posthuman' is now being widely invoked as the 'inevitable' next evolutionary stage that humans are facing. Who comes after the human? This is the question that posthumanists are taking as their starting point. This critical introduction understands posthumanism as a discourse, which, in principle, includes everything that has been and is being said about the figure of the 'posthuman'. It outlines the genealogy of the various posthuman 'scenarios' in circulation and engages with their theoretical and philosophical assumptions and social and political implications. It does so by connecting the philosophical debate about the future of humanity with a range of texts, including examples from new media, popular culture, science and the media.