In lieu of an abstract: This volume gathers Swedish and international Human Animal Studies scholars on the topic of human animal geographies.

Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous to our `human' societies. Interdisciplinary human/animal research has - for 50 years - drawn attention to how animals are ever-present in what we think of as human spaces and cultures. Our societies are built with animals and through all kinds of multispecies interactions. From public spaces and laboratories to homes, farms and in the `wilderness'; human and nonhuman animals meet to make space and place together, through webs of power relations. However, the very spaces of these interactions are not mute or passive themselves. The spaces where species meet matter, and shape human/animal relations. This book takes as its starting point the relationship between place and human/animal interaction. It brings together the work of leading scholars in human/animal studies, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. With a distinct focus on place, physical space and biocultural geography, the authors of this volume consider the ways in which space, human and nonhuman animals co-constitute each other, how they make spaces together, produce meaning around them, struggle over access, how these places are storied and how stories of spaces matter. Presenting studies thematically and including a variety of nonhuman creatures in a range of settings, this book delivers new understandings of the importance of nonhuman animals to understandings of place - and the role of places in shaping our interactions with nonhuman creatures. As pets, as laboratory animals, as exhibits, as parasites, as livestock, as quarry, as victims of disaster or objects of folklore, this book offers insights into human/animal intermingling at locales and settings of great relevance to many areas of research, including geography, sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, history and anthropology. This book meets the evolving interest in human/animal interaction, anthrozoology, and the environmental humanities in relation to the research on space and place that currently informs the humanities and the social sciences.

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With toxic pollutants as a rising threat, important questions about environmental justice, gender, and the sexual politics of environmental movements issue an urgent challenge to intersectional gender and science studies; to anticolonial, queer, and trans theory; as well as to environmental and human-animal studies at large. Taking up this challenge, this piece aims at attending to the ways toxic embodiment disturbs or aligns with multiple boundaries of sexes, generations, races, geographies, nation-states, and species and how toxicity has re-dynamized corporeality and the biochemical materiality of bodies.

Background:

Oophorectomy prior to natural menopause places women at increased risk of dementia and/or Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recent findings from our Toronto group reveal a negative association between oophorectomy prior to natural menopause and verbal memory in middle-aged women. We have also found a positive association between estrogen levels and verbal recall. Taken together, these findings support previous work suggesting that oophorectomy, leading to reduced levels of estrogens, is detrimental to verbal memory. Estrogen withdrawal has also been correlated with reduced hippocampal volume and reduced hippocampal resting functional connectivity (FC), both early AD biomarkers. Thus, we wondered whether hippocampal volume and resting functional connectivity would be reduced in women with oophorectomy prior to natural menopause.

Methods:

In order to determine this, we recruited healthy, Swedish women (30 and 55 years) with the breast cancer mutation gene (BRCA1/2) who had a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) prior to natural menopause. Most women were between 1–7 years post-BSO and at least 6 months post-cancer treatment or had not had cancer. Using magnetic resonance imaging (3T scanner, Phillips) we measured functional resting state over 10 minutes and volume with a T1 structural scan. We collected urine in order to determine estrogen and progesterone levels.

Results:

We hypothesize that women with BSO will have structural and functional hippocampal changes compared to age matched controls. We predict that women with BSO will have smaller hippocampal volumes and reduced hippocampal FC. We further predict that lower levels of estrogens will correlate with these brain changes. Neuroimaging and endocrine analyses are ongoing.

Conclusions:

AD affects women in greater numbers and one possibility is that oophorectomy prior to natural menopause contributes to these numbers. Determining whether or not these women show the earliest biomarkers for AD will increase our understanding of estrogen withdrawal's effects on brain health as well as its importance for healthy brain aging. Importantly, results of this study will inform us on the early brain changes in a population at greater risk of AD.

In considering deep time ethics and Anthropocene heritage, this paper (and subsequent chapter) discuss intragenerational care in the registers of feminist posthumanities and environmental humanities through the case of the waste-to-energy plant Gärstadsverken i Linköping, Sweden.  

Starting from the assumptions of feminist perspectives from various forms of re-invented humanities, this chapter approaches the major research question of how better to re-tie the material and immaterial knots between past, present and future generations for heritage research. This is a research question guiding us in our project on deep-time interventions and intragenerational care that we explore here through the multi-temporal site of the Gärstad waste-to-energy plant. This plant resides just outside the town of Linköping in south-east Sweden, a site we often pass by on our way home or to the university. The over-arching intent of our research is to contribute to the sociocultural and material transformations needed for us all to become more gracious ancestors for multispecies generations to come.

This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multifaceted intersec-tions of technology, embodiment, identity, and ecology through the lens of cyborg knowing. The first contribution focuses on the vulnerabilities faced by individuals with implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), emphasizing the crucial need for acclimatization strategies and agency in navigating their cybernetic embodiment as “everyday cyborg”. The second contribu-tion critically examines cultural technologies revealing their role in perpet-uating biases and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on feminist STS and cyborg theory, to adaptively reshape societal constructs. Lastly, the third contribution envisions a comprehensive theory of cyber-zoa that extends the cyborg figuration to encompass nonhuman animals, fostering a post-anthropocentric perspective and an ecologically attuned examination of power relations, exploitation, and symmetrical relation-ships. By engaging with the concept of the cyborg, these contributions shed light on the complex dynamics and transformative potentials inher-ent in the realm of technology for both human and nonhuman lives

Cultural and social studies of sildenafil (Viagra) have shown how it in influence more than just blood flow in the penis. Sildenafil has introduced the term "erectile dysfunction" (ED) to the general public, changing wider cultural perceptions and the treatment of impotence. This article presents results from a study on how this pharmaceutical drug was introduced to a Swedish audience, where direct-to-consumer marketing is not all allowed. Our studies of the online market information (presented as health education) show that not only does the globalization of the pharmaceutical market make medicines available to international consumers, it also spreads ideas about the healthy subjectivities— gendered identities and behaviors—those medicines are prescribing. This, we feel, calls for further critical consideration to articulate the prescribed social practices that prescription medicines carry.

An exploration of how global pharmaceutical products are localized - of what happens when they become ’glocal’ - this book examines the tensions that exist between a global pharmaceutical market and the locally bounded discourses and regulations encountered as markets are created for new drugs in particular contexts. Employing the case study of the emergence, representation and regulation of Viagra in the Swedish market, Glocal Pharma offers analyses of commercial material, medical discourses and legal documents to show how a Swedish, Viagra-consuming subject has been constructed in relation to the drug and how Viagra is imagined in relation to the Swedish man.

Engaging with debates about pharmaceuticalization, the authors consider the ways in which new identities are created around drugs, the redefinition of health problems as sits of pharmaceutical treatment and changes in practices of governance to reflect the entrance of pharmaceuticals to the market. With attention to ’local’ contexts, it reveals elements in the nexus of pharmaceutcalization that are receptive to cultural elements as new products become embedded in local markets.

An empirically informed study of the ways in which the presence of a drug can alter the concept of a disease and its treatment, understandings of who suffers from it and how to cure it - both locally and internationally - this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and science and technology studies with interests in globalization, pharmaceuticals, gender and the sociology of medicine.

Using the Pfizer funded Swedish informational site about erectile dysfunction (ED), www.potenslinjen.se, we examine how potential users, their partners, and medical doctors are enrolled in the process of creating the Swedish Viagra user. Contextualized against other critical work on Viagra, our analysis shows how the commercial discourse embeds the ED patient into a network of actors. Three separate actors are co-constituted and enrolled by this erectile dysfunction information discourse, comprising Viagra marketing material in a country which forbids direct to consumer advertising of prescription medication. Doctors are enrolled to produce the cultural authority of expert medical knowledge, whereas partners are given responsibility for the emotional aspects of a man’s sexuality and encouraged to direct the man toward the relationship-saving Viagra. Throughout, though, the man is the patient responsible for taking Viagra to fix his dysfunctioning penis. We problematize this individualised solution by contrasting it with the social aspects of the discourse and examining other qualitative and historical studies of impotence. We then ask if the enrolment presented by the Swedish Viagra website could be (mis)used to expand the circle of actors involved in ED, redefi ning the ‘problem’ and opening for a wider variety of treatments.

Using the Pfizer funded Swedish informational site about erectile dysfunction (ED), www.potenslinjen.se, we examine how potential users, their partners, and medical doctors are enrolled in the process of creating the Swedish Viagra user. Contextualized against other critical work on Viagra, our analysis shows how the commercial discourse embeds the ED patient into a network of actors. Three separate actors are co-constituted and enrolled by this erectile dysfunction information discourse, comprising Viagra marketing material in a country which forbids direct to consumer advertising of prescription medication. Doctors are enrolled to produce the cultural authority of expert medical knowledge, whereas partners are given responsibility for the emotional aspects of a man’s sexuality and encouraged to direct the man toward the relationship-saving Viagra. Throughout, though, the man is the patient responsible for taking Viagra to fix his dysfunctioning penis. We problematize this individualised solution by contrasting it with the social aspects of the discourse and examining other qualitative and historical studies of impotence. We then ask if the enrolment presented by the Swedish Viagra website could be (mis)used to expand the circle of actors involved in ED, redefi ning the ‘problem’ and opening for a wider variety of treatments.

This chapter examines how men, their doctors and their partners are enrolled by the Pfizer-sponsored website for potential Swedish Viagra customers. We read this enrolment as an example of how new techno-social identities are created by a drug, in this case, Viagra. The Swedish-language site www.potenslinjen.se2 (in English, ‘potency hotline’) is framed as a source of information for laypeople concerned about erectile dysfunction.3 We have examined how the site’s text and imagery address different audiences in the construction of the Swedish Viagra man. Our analysis builds on existing literature about the promotion of Viagra which addresses the construction of erectile dysfunction (ED) and masculinity in other national contexts, and we therefore make mention of alternative images and readings in other contexts throughout our analysis. Like previous critical studies of Viagra (Fishman and Mamo 2001; Marshall 2006; Tiefer 2006; Vares and Braun 2006), we are examining the construction of an ideal user of Viagra, but we also discuss the way the enrolment of doctors and partners serves to position ED in the man and define its treatment as a solitary act of taking a pill while simultaneously involving the other actors to help the medicine function.

The project that triggered this book was named “Prescriptive Prescriptions. Pharmaceuticals and ‘Healthy’ Subjectivities.” As discussed in Chap.  1, Introduction, our initial task was to map out and explore how pharmaceuticals were prescribing healthy subject positions for the individuals targeted by them. But pharmaceuticals do much more than prescribe healthy personhood. They also prescribe healthy social relationships whose very existence and enactment can be imagined as requiring the consumption of a prescription medication. The two chapters in this part detail how this is done discursively by focusing on commercial images and texts used to market and sell Alzheimer’s, prostate and human papillomavirus pharmaceuticals.

The project that triggered this book was named “Prescriptive Prescriptions. Pharmaceuticals and ‘Healthy’ Subjectivities.” As discussed in Chap.  1, Introduction, our initial task was to map out and explore how pharmaceuticals were prescribing healthy subject positions for the individuals targeted by them. But pharmaceuticals do much more than prescribe healthy personhood. They also prescribe healthy social relationships whose very existence and enactment can be imagined as requiring the consumption of a prescription medication. The two chapters in this part detail how this is done discursively by focusing on commercial images and texts used to market and sell Alzheimer’s, prostate and human papillomavirus pharmaceuticals.

The book is aimed at providing an assertion of Gender Studies as a vital community in our time, united in a commitment to inquiry. It brings forward an interdisciplinary set of early career researchers’ accounts of their motives for engaging in Gender Studies and, of the encounters with limitations as well as possibilities they experience on the paths they have chosen. Each chapter is accompanied by a brief response paper where a more senior researcher involves in conversation with respective chapter’s content and shares reflections regarding Gender Studies, its integration, and developments. The first level corresponds with the significance of research in the field and its transformative power in and, crucially, outside the academia. The second relates to the value of networking and community building for doing research. The book presents Gender Studies in a communicative, open manner that invites the reader to engage in and continue the displayed discussions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, sociology, queer studies, women’s studies, trans studies, anthropology, and literary studies.

The book is aimed at providing an assertion of Gender Studies as a vital community in our time, united in a commitment to inquiry. It brings forward an interdisciplinary set of early career researchers’ accounts of their motives for engaging in Gender Studies and, of the encounters with limitations as well as possibilities they experience on the paths they have chosen.

Each chapter is accompanied by a brief response paper where a more senior researcher involves in conversation with respective chapter’s content and shares reflections regarding Gender Studies, its integration, and developments. The first level corresponds with the significance of research in the field and its transformative power in and, crucially, outside the academia. The second relates to the value of networking and community building for doing research.

The book presents Gender Studies in a communicative, open manner that invites the reader to engage in and continue the displayed discussions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, sociology, queer studies, women’s studies, trans studies, anthropology, and literary studies.

In this exploratory paper, we focus on intersecting design political and visual processes of gendering and racializing in online AI image generators, in particular ArtBreeder and Midjourney. While AI image generators are becoming an integrated part of our contemporary society, they draw on cultural and historical imaging conventions of sorting and ordering the world and the people in it. These tools' powerful visual rhetoric can potentially aggravate existing discrimination, if not critically reflected upon. We argue that these design-facilitated representations position the ‘user’ into cultural imagery of representations with political implications. With an intersectional perspective from the feminist visual analysis, we critique and uncover how gender and ethnicity are represented and built into the systems, both in terms of visual culture and in designed interactions. We problematize these design strategies, and urge the HCI community to engage in further design political inquiries regarding the visual culture mediated by AI image generators.

This position paper outlines a multidirectional approach to what we call Anthropocene ecologies, its diverse genealogies, and methodological and conceptual foci. Under the heading of Anthropocene ecologies we seek to fertilize the sciences of ecology with approaches of queer and feminist new materialisms, and engage in multiple collaborations across the humanities, sciences, and everyday ecological practices. Specifically we draw on ecology as the object of analysis and the methodology, building on concepts and approaches from the sciences, material feminisms, science and technology studies, human/animal studies and material ecocriticism. Five modes of attention become particularly salient for our analysis of the Anthropocene ecologies of solar energy, humananimal relations, organic food production, wetlands, and human-robot relations. First we attend to how these ecologies are generated within and affect the webs of multispecies ecologies in late capitalism. Second we suggest the concept of biogeotechno-power to capture the entanglements of the biological, the geologic and the technological in new formations of power that invest, regulate, enhance, and dispose of (more-than-)human bodies in particular ecological relationalities. Third we examine the multiplicities of ecological temporalities, including the deep time of mineralisation, fossilisation and past and future species survival. Fourth we attend to affect as an entangling force in ecological relations. And fifth we investigate an affirmative posthuman ethics of concern and response-ability in relations with living and nonliving materialities that might not be close by (spatially and/or temporally). Anthropocene ecologies thereby include the technical, informational, temporal, affective, and ethical as integral parts of ecological intra-actions, and remain attuned to the differential, paradoxical and unexpected.

This position paper outlines a multidirectional approach to what we call Anthropocene ecologies, its diverse genealogies, and methodological and conceptual foci. Under the heading of Anthropocene ecologies we seek to fertilize the sciences of ecology with approaches of queer and feminist new materialisms, and engage in multiple collaborations across the humanities, sciences, and everyday ecological practices. Specifically we draw on ecology as the object of analysis and the methodology, building on concepts and approaches from the sciences, material feminisms, science and technology studies, human/animal studies and material ecocriticism. Five modes of attention become particularly salient for our analysis of the Anthropocene ecologies of solar energy, humananimal relations, organic food production, wetlands, and human-robot relations. First we attend to how these ecologies are generated within and affect the webs of multispecies ecologies in late capitalism. Second we suggest the concept of biogeotechno-power to capture the entanglements of the biological, the geologic and the technological in new formations of power that invest, regulate, enhance, and dispose of (more-than-)human bodies in particular ecological relationalities. Third we examine the multiplicities of ecological temporalities, including the deep time of mineralisation, fossilisation and past and future species survival. Fourth we attend to affect as an entangling force in ecological relations. And fifth we investigate an affirmative posthuman ethics of concern and response-ability in relations with living and nonliving materialities that might not be close by (spatially and/or temporally). Anthropocene ecologies thereby include the technical, informational, temporal, affective, and ethical as integral parts of ecological intra-actions, and remain attuned to the differential, paradoxical and unexpected.

This chapter focuses on the fruit fly as model territories. It investigates both the practised and heavily trafficked corporeal site of the fly, laboratory technospace of human-animal interaction, and the wider biopolitical/biosocial domain, where boundaries between human and animal, life and death, nature and culture are constantly redrawn through the choreographies of the laboratory fly. Fruit flies are in fact quite small and take up very little space – in both laboratories and in the scientific ethical imaginary. Despite their influential position within natural sciences and laboratory life, these flies are exempted from most ethical protocols for animal models. The chapter focuses on a very specific species of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and how it in a way has embodied the very iconic emergence of the life sciences. It argues that – whatever view on animals in laboratory practice – they represent or index our disease for us.

At the end of World War II, tens of thousands of tons of chemical warfare agents - mostly mustard gas - were dumped in the Gotland Deep - a deep basin in the middle of the otherwise shallow Baltic Sea. Decades later, these weapons are being reactivated - both literally (perhaps on the faces of dead seals, and in fishermens nets) and also in our imaginations. In this story that recounts the beginning of our research into this situation, militarization meets with environmental concern: the past floats into the present, where humans and non-humans are equally implicated, where the sea itself conditions the kinds of questions we can ask, and answers we might get, and where terms like threat and risk remain undecided. After spending time on Gotland Island - the closest terrestrial site to these weapons dumps - we ask what kinds of research methods might be adequate to these tangled, underwater tales that we find so difficult to fathom.

This chapter proposes that climate imaginaries are a vital part of governance. In the particular context of the Anthropocene, there is a need to consider the kinds of orientations that an Anthropocene climate imaginary evokes, while also seeking out "alter-Anthropocene" imaginaries -- visions and practices that we might cultivate as engines of possibility for climate governance and beyond. To explore such alternatives, we use illustrations taken from climate art, supported by cultural theory emerging from critical feminist posthumanities. While feminist posthumanism is not typically connected to work on climate governance, we aver that its attention to the power of imaginaries to shape actions, as well as its focus on creative responses to worldly problems that are “more-than-human” in nature, present an important opportunity to address difficult-to-measure dimensions of climate governance: namely, the ability to reimagine ways of getting on in a world where humans are not the only bodies that matter, and where both humans and non-human bodies (including other species, elements, and geophysical forces) are entangled in the exigencies of climate change.

Elämä tavataan nähdä kuoleman vastakohtana. Tällaisen kahtiajaon ulkopuolelle mahtuu kuitenkin paljon ontologisia ja eettisiä kysymyksiä, joita on lähdettävä purkamaan toisesta suunnasta. Marietta Radomska ja Cecilia Åsberg ehdottavat suunnaksi biofilosofiaa, jossa elämistä ja kuolemista tarkastellaan yhteen kietoutuneina ja yhdessä muuttuvina.

The question of life has been in the centre of attention since the inception of Western philosophy, including the pre-Socratics search for the essence of life to Aristitle's "psukhe" with its own capacity for self-nourishment, growth and decay and Kant's take on life as the question of the human subject engaging with life as an object of thought. Philosophical queries into the question of life also however asks what critical relations are precluded in the very classifications of what gets to count as life and not-life. Process ontological philosophies, after Canguilheim and Foucault, have reformulated the life/non-life issue on terms of ontological politics and ethics with key concepts such as "necropolitics" (Mbebe), "bare life" and "thanatopolitics" (Agamben). Bioart and feminist biophilosophy (Radomska) offers new challenges to the taken-for-granted notion of life and introduces the concept of "non/living". Examples are given from feminist environmental humanities research on toxic embodiment and from feminist science studies on laboratory practices of life and killing. A suggestion is made that these two concepts, toxic embodiment and non/living work as biophilosophical tools of analysis and exploration. This because they redirect our attention from essences and norms to processes, potentials and possibilities of living and dying in the here and now.  

A feminist biophilosophical discussion on the ethics of non/life, bio- and eco art, toxic embodiment and environmental humanities.

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

I akademin är det vanligt att man högtidlighåller och firar framstående och seniora professorer som fyller jämt genom att författa en vänbok. Jag har i min egen bokhylla flera sådana volymer och de har alla det gemensamt att kollegor eller andra som står jubilaren nära har författat ett kapitel eller avsnitt. Temat för boken brukar vara ett särskilt vetenskapligt fält, en fråga eller en metod som ligger födelsedagsbarnet varmt om hjärtat. På så sätt visar man professorn sin uppskattning och tecknar i viss mån hans eller hennes vetenskapliga värv. Det du nu håller i din hand är just en sådan vänbok men av ett litet annat slag. Jubilaren i det här fallet är nämligen inte en person, inte någon framstående forskare och professor. Jubilaren som tillägnas denna bok är en mycket speciell organisation i det akademiska landskapet och heter Forum för genusvetenskap och jämställdhet. Anledningen till att vi författat denna vänbok är att Forum som inrättning vid Linköpings universitetfyllt 25 år och vi vill på detta sätt hylla vår vän!

As we are living through a transformative response to a viral pandemic, this think piece suggests a reimagining of the environmental humanities in the open-ended inventories of feminist posthumanities and the low trophic registers of the oceanic. Sea farming of low trophic species such as seaweeds and bivalves is still underexplored option for the mitigation of climate change and diminishing species diversity in the warming oceans of the world. The affordances of low trophic mariculture for coastal life and for contributing to society’s transition into climate aware practices of eating, socializing and thinking is here considered, and showcased as an example of the practical uses of feminist environmental posthumanities.

Environmental humanities has been established as an interdisciplinary area of research in close relationship with art, feminist and multispecies theory and practice but environmental science. This piece explores on the affordances, urgency and special uses of EH research, situated to fomulate new insights between art and science in a global situation of pandemics and scientific climate warnings. A case is made for a sea change in the EH, that is for a concrete engagment with the oceanic and with human-marine relationships and threats to environmental health. A suggestion is made for how to mitigate oceanic environmental problems, by engaging artistic, scientific and local communities in a re-appraisal of low trophic mariculture and its many benefits to sustainable societies.   

 Koningin Christina van Zweden ging in de 17e eeuw haar eigen gang. Lapte de verwachtingen van haar 'als vrouw' aan haar laars en was ook nog eens een toonaangevende intellectueel. Maar ze had ook een zeer lage dunk van datgene wat -typisch vrouwelijk- was en gaf bovendien vrijwillig haar macht op. Even slikken voor wie haar graag als recalcitrante koningin in het hart had gesloten. Maar toch een inspirerend rolmodel.

Den här boken introducerar några viktiga författare på samtidsaktuella teoriområden. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Serres och Annemarie Mol presenteras i boken, som också innehåller översatta texter av dessa namn. Boken ger en bakgrund till och en överblick över ett område i intensiv teoriutveckling. Här presenteras den så kallade materiella, posthumana eller ontologiska vändningen. Här kartläggs grunderna för olika posthumanistiska förhållningssätt till de både mänskliga och icke-mänskliga (djur, miljö, teknik) krafterna i vår värld så som de begreppsliggjorts inom filosofi, feministisk teori, kulturstudier och samhällsvetenskapliga studier av naturvetenskap, medicin och teknik. Genom lästips och en omfattande litteraturlista öppnar boken för fortsatta studier och vidare diskussioner. Avslutningsvis finns också en omfattande ordlista med viktiga nyckelbegrepp som i sig ger en introduktion till ett heterogent forskningsfält. Boken riktar sig till studenter, doktorander och andra nyfikna forskare inom olika tvärvetenskapliga eller disciplinära former av humaniora och samhällsvetenskap.

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere”

(Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937)  

The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity (in for instance my own “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). 

Myself, I will explore a couple of “alien species” in these waters, ranging cannisters of mustard gas to Pacific oysters and other storied bodies out of order, so to try to provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality. 

Adopting the "companion species" approach of Haraway—a grappling with charged bits of life—the ordinary story of my own relationships with an adopted mix-breed dog, "Blackie Lawless" assists my understanding in this essay. It makes the connection clear between Haraway’s cyborg concept, a a subspecies of her new, more comprehensive kin figuration of ‘‘companion species’’. Both are figures of lively ontology and ways of knowing within dynamic emergences of their times. As developed in Haraway's book, When Species Meet, ‘‘companion species’’ anchors a form of reluctant post-humanist approach that aims, not to discard anything related to humans, but to think people (and, to practice the humanities) differently. Haraway makes an argument for interspecies survival. In the following I offer my reading of When Species Meet, my bits and bites of sensation, frustration, and curiosity within Haraway’s dog land. Moreover, I also read Haraway in the light of three decades of feminist struggles to come to terms with the body, with biology, and with more-than human existences. I believe these struggles to be crucial for the future survival and proliferation of feminist scholarship, in terms of feminist forms of post-humanities as more humane and more-than-human humanities.

Cecilia Åsberg’s documentation of the coastal “wrack zone” in Scandinavia pays close attention to histories of militarization near Gotland and the convergence of leftover munitions alongside seaweeds that have been washed ashore, also on the Swedish westcoast. Åsberg describes a picturesque coastal background where “bony white and gray rock meet brown algae and the hope of finding amber” against decades of industrial, often military, waste, ranging from World War leftovers of munitions and mustard gas to agricultural fertilizers. Swayed by the seaweeds themselves through modes of writing that reflect drifts in attention at field sites along Scandinavian coastlines, or finding solidarity with seaweeds against extractive or colonial regimes, this piece aims to story sea-side exposures beyond damage narratives. 

In this essay to the section Crossing Boundaries of OA journal Technoscienza, I discuss the plethora of interdisciplinary approaches to the present world troubles from the prism offered by Donna J Haraway's concept of the cyborg and the situated knowledges ensuing in its wake.  

  "Concepts up for discussion: On the concept of genus in Swedish Gender Studies"

This article concerns a lively conceptual debatethat took place in Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift (Swedish Journal of Women's Studies) between 1980-1998. When Yvonne Hirdman, a Swedish historian, in 1988 introduced the concepts of gender and gender system in KVT (in Swedish: genus and genussystem), this sparked off intense discussions and caused theoretical divisions within Swedish feminism. Opinions were divided on the direction that one believed feminist theory should take. Should one strive for something like a new Grand Theory on women's subordination or should the aspirations be somewhat smaller?In this article the author illustrates the shifting emphases in the journal on such theoretical problems as essentialism versus social constructivism and agents of change versus stabile structures -perspectives. The article also takes into account the new challenges that different theories of a more or less postmodern nature put forward, for instance sexual difference theory. The ongoing feminist theoretical developmenthas included an expansion, both in terms of a broadening of the investigatory horizon and research delving deeper into various fields. Nowadays Women's Studies is part of the larger field of Gender Studies. Genus, today, signifies the growing amount of knowledge about sex and gender,femininity and masculinity, and is often conceptualized,not as a system, but as an ongoing identity forging process of historically changing ideas.