Jag menar att feministisk forskning står mitt i en posthumanistisk utmaning. När människor idag på ett alltmer uppenbart sätt är invävda i komplexa relationer till teknik, medicin och naturvetenskap, till andra djur, omgivning och miljö, skakas humanismens teorier om mänsklighetens villkor och etik, liksom dess exkluderande biopolitik, om ordentligt. Humanvetenskapernas omfång och räckvidd har också utmanats. Från det inre av ämnen som filosofi, historia och litteraturvetenskap har genusforskning tillsammans med cultural studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, science and literature studies sprungit fram och bidragit med grundläggande ifrågasättanden av humanioras studieobjekt, studiesubjekt, disciplinära normer, kunskapsregimer och maktrelationer. Humaniora är en mäktig traditionsbevarare, men också samtidigt en vital plats för kritik och uppfinningsrikedom. Det är en plats grogrund för ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv med utgångspunkt i feministisk teori.

A wealth of contemporary speculative practices on how to deal with life, death, and co-existence on a planet haunted by pandemics, mass species extinctions, climate change, and rampant societal injustice are currently circulating, in public — in academia, in art, and in activism. Existential concerns, what the humanities are well-equipped to handle, and new insights are sought after in public. So how can the humanities respond well? For instance to the normative notions of the human that make some people more killable than others (like the elderly COVID-patients in Swedish nursing homes, black men in the US, born or unborn girls in very poor communities, refugees in camps, indigenous environmental activists in the global South). How can the humanities make themselves, to use a term from Donna Haraway, respons-able for how a ‘normative human’ has also shaped the planet into such an inhabitable or even toxic place for many others? One answer, a well-trodden path by now, are the feminist posthumanities, and how they together (as environmental humanities, medical humanities, decolonial humanities, queer humanities, technohumanities, posthuman or multispecies humanities) question the exclusions and inclusions made in the name of the human and the humanities. Here theory meets practice, science meets art, and a transformational sense of humanity meets the people.   

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.

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We are currently witnessing a genuine proliferation of new feminist or pro-feminist work on posthumanities, in art and research, in Sweden as in other corners of the world. What matters most to me as a feminist scholar is the synergy and new conversations within feminist theory, and what they can do. Reinventing the humanities today can no longer signify the relaunching of a school of thought, style, or theory with a hegemonic vocation. It must entail the very recomposition of disciplinarity, theory, and everyday doing. Feminist posthumanities testify not to any crisis of the content, rigor, or intellectual liveliness of the humanities and adjacent social sciences, but to its sociability in the more-than-human domains. Feminist posthumanities, with its mixed origin stories and foremothers, are to me the becoming minoritarian of collective academic insight, and it comes with both its perks (great networking, new experiences, fun, failures, and situated insights), and setbacks (this type of research is not easily funded, often short-lived, and project-based). It is needed more now than ever, as we need communities that work together, across the ecologies and technologies of the postnatural condition we often simply call the Anthropocene.

In this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or "rotifers," emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research (and others) might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

Vår tids stora fråga rör handling, vad en kan göra när nästan all form av handling framstår som besudlad eller oren? Vilka är möjligheterna  för tanke och handling i en anda av samexistens i splittrad värld? Inom litteraturvetenskaperna har ekokritiken definierat ett brett område som snabbt etablerat en uppsjö teoretiska positioner. Ekokritiska metoder har också påverkat näraliggande forskningsämnen och varit viktiga för etableringen av nyhumanioran som erbjuds inom ramen för miljöorienterad humaniora, environmental humanities. Miljö- och hållbarhetsfrågor som samhället brottas med idag gör ekokritisk kreativitet än mer aktuell. I mitt efterord till boken Ekokritiska metoder emfaserar jag ekokritikens roll och relation inom miljöhumaniora och samtidsdebatt. Jag pekar mot en kreativ-skapande-görande approach till berättande som gör ekokritik till en mer än mänsklig angelägenhet i en värld som snabbt förändras och som behöver lika snabbt föränderliga analysansatser. Mer än mänsklig humaniora (posthumaniora), ekokritik, ekofeminismer och miljöhumaniora omarbetar frentetiskt - och i samarbeten - idag vår självsyn och kulturella berättelser för att bättre fungera med en splittrad och skadad värld. Den går från ord till handling.      

The cyborg is a figure we now easily connect with early 1990s feminist technoscience studies,indeed it is a foundational figure of the field. However, cyborgs do not just trace older, but also a lot more ambiguous and less feminist roots within our technoscientific modernity. Theaim of this article is to provide a genealogical map of feminist entanglements with especiallythe biological sciences and with the body. In particular, I aim here to show how the figure of the cyborg in fact might be positioned as the first sign materializing and anticipating what wetoday might call the ontological turn within feminist theory and technoscience studies.

This chapter, on the oceanic and seaweed work of artist Signe Johannessen, explores extra-disciplinarity in the registers of art, philososphy and science in order to outline the emerging arts of sustainability for learning to live better on a damaged planet.  

In lieu of an abstract.

This chapter describes the watery and sea side works of Scandinavian artist Signe Johannessen, especially her work on kelp, sea weed and oceanic arts. 

This glossary entry describes what feminist posthumanities may entail.

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

Review of the dissertation Figures of Fantasy. Women, Cyberdiscourse and the Popular Internet, by Susanna Paasonen, Turku, Finland.

 Unpublished conference paper. 

This study investigates how representations of genes and genetics have given rise to new kinds of cultural imageries created and reflected in popular science media. The concept of popular/science is used here in order to circumvent the traditional diffusion model of science communication, and to focus instead on how popular science media taps into scientific discourse just as scientific representations draw on popular imagery. The study thus shows how the new genetics is not created in a cultural vacuum, but thrives in the intersection of popular culture and science culture. The main argument is that together with the changing genetic imageries in popular/science both conventional and unconventional ways of enacting gender, sexuality and race emerge. Thus the illustrations and stories assembled and analysed here can be regarded as contested sites of social change.

This exploration of contemporary representations of genes and genetics is performed with analytical tools from the overlappmg fields of feminist cultural studies, visual studies, and science and literature studies. As the ways of representing genes and generics in the visual field of popular science media are mapped out, the thesis gives a partial and local account of the mosaic of the genetic imaginary - a discursive fantasy landscape which is used as a resource for collective subject formations, and in which cultural communities mirror and articulate themselves.

 Editor's introduction to special issue on "Genetiske forestillinger".

Thematic issue - on representations of the new genetics and our shared social imaginary around genes and genetics (ed. Cecilia Åsberg)  - of the Danish scholarly journal Kvinder, køn og forskning (Danish journal of gender studies) 

 I samband med Bengt Olle Bengtssons publikation (2006), ett symposion med samma namn, Genetiska konflikter, där ett flertal forskare presenterade kritiska perspektiv på genetiken. 

This piece introduces the broad research topic of gender and technology.

This chapter (in Dutch) introduces the feminist figuration of the cyborg and feminist science studies perspectives on biology.

 Documentation of the conference Utopias and dystopias, October 2000, celebration of Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift 20 years.

 Unpublished conference paper.  

Vision has often been a central concern of feminist studies of science, medicine and technology. In cultural or social feminist analysis, the male gaze and the ways in which technoscience accommodates, and in effect organizes the watching of women, has been an important part of the feminist interrogation of the gender and power relations that produce the subjects and the objects of science. This attention is due to the intimate, and power-saturated, merge of processes of seeing and processes of knowing. Inherent in the notion of vision, there is always a politics to ways of seeing, ordering and observing, of organising the knowledge of the world. Historically, this can be exemplified by the eighteen-century Swedish “father” of biological classification, Linnaeus. Taking a leap away from Christian assumptions, Linnaeus placed human beings in a taxonomic order of nature together with other animals.

Detta bokkapitel ger en inledning till en viktig perpektivförskjutning inom humaniora och samhällsvetenskap och till de posthumanistiska perspektiv som utvecklats under flera decennier inom olika forskningsområden utifrån post-disciplinära och post-konstruktionistiska utgångspunkter.  

 Unpublished conference paper. 

 Available online. 

 Interview with Prof. José Van Dijck on popular images of genetics. 

UNESCO TALK 1. Posthumanities as Multispecies Tales: STORYING EXPOSURE

Cecilia Åsberg

In an all too humanized world, environmental storytelling finds itself in desperate times but also in times of opportunity. It matters what stories tell stories, stated Marilyn Strathern (1992:10), a feminist anthropologist of science already in the 1990s. Building on that embrace of storytelling, Donna J Haraway (2016 a:12), famously continued: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters /…/, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions […]. It matters what stories make worlds; what worlds make stories.” Put simply, wording is a conduit of worlding. In this very interdisciplinary scenario, all kinds of story-telling matters. From various perspectives to responsive posthumanities that I bring together in this talk, I wish here to give some theoretical and empirical examples of the practices I have come to term storying exposure. 

Threats and fears of looming environmental crisis instils a conservative emergency response in people (Mbembe & Roitman 1995), to look out only for themselves and not for others, to stay in line. This means we need today to work harder than ever before to produce stories and expositions that instil a sense of wordly belonging and local community. Literature, reading and vulnerability studies have a special role in this. Recent works in environmental humanities, ecocriticism and place-based storytelling (Haraway 2014; Alaimo 2016; van Dooren 2014; DeSilvey 2017) have explored many types of exposure stories. From The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin to Animal’s People by Indra Sinha. There is even a growing tendency in Environmental Humanities to seek accounts for giving polarized debates and heating climates, stressed environments and communities storied form in ways that might eschew the trap of focusing only on “damage stories.” Vary of the performative power of storytelling, a stance of proud pessimism and cynicism (disguised as criticism) is rejected because it may hinder unexpected possibilities social change. There is always more afoot, and reasons for surprise. Many seek expressions instead of ways of living well with and caring for, in the words of queer eco-critic Cate Sandilands, the “wounds of the world.” Indeed, experimenting with the triangular relation between self, word and world is itself a form of exposure. In academic and extra-academic settings, I have come to call such affirmative practices posthumanities – for how they bridge arts and sciences, natures and cultures, words and worlds. Storying exposure is here understood as methodological umbrella term for such “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al) that we can jointly explore and develop for very interdisciplinary research, in-field philosophies, eco-critique and place-storied forms of situated knowledges.

             References:             

Mbembe, Achille, and Janet Roitman. 1995. "Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis."  Public Culture 7 (323-352). 

Alaimo, S. (2016) Exposed: environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times (University of Minnesota Press)

DeSilvey, C. (2017) Curating Decay (University of Minnesota Press)

Haraway, D. (2014) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press)

van Dooren, T. (2014) Flight Ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction (Colombia University Press)

The cultural technologies of gender, race and empire drive much of the present Anthropocene crisis, now and in the past. Everyday algorithms reproduce and multiply our cultural biases on a global scale. Anthropocentrism, humanistic supremacy and individualistic territorialism are rampant, making us all less humane. Society awakes slowly from the modern illusion of categorical identities and divides that keep nature from culture, human from animal, environment from embodiment, technology from biology and arts from science and society. The argument here is for taking stock of ways of cyborg knowing-also beyond the academic confines. It is time for new knowledge integrations forged in intellectual generosity. The cyborg, as a discipline-crossing figure, proposed theory-practices and practice-theories for how to readjust our high consumption, high energy and hyper-instrumental society, and ourselves, adaptively. In this piece, I proposed that feminist STS and cyborg knowing work as a prominent entry into the transformative multiverse of feminist posthumanities in practice.A

Detta miljökommunikationsevent var ett konstnärligt och vetenskapligt event som utgör en del av det ungdomsorienterade FORMAS projeketet Reclaiming Futures, där forskare och vetenskapskommunikatörer och konstnärliga gestaltare under ett år arbetat med olika ungdomsgrupper med uttrycks- och gestaltningstekniker så som kortfilm, stop-motion animation, dokumentär, poesi, association, kurerande av utställningar och annan konstnärlig gestaltning. 

In lieu of an abstract; This short position piece takes a critical and creative look at the concept of resilience and compares it with the feminist notion of the cyborg. It finds that both are ambigious concepts for founding politics, ethics and practices of environmental justice.

  Respons to the presentations by prof. Jackie Stacey and prof. Anneke Smelik on science in popular culture.

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.

This paper explores the contemporary Nordic environmental imaginary from the starting point in the Gotland Deep and the dumpings of chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea.

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.

Reviews: 'Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture' is an indispensable introduction to third wave feminism and contemporary gender studies. It is international in scope, multidisciplinary in method, and transmedial in coverage. It shows how far feminist theory has come since Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and marks out clearly how much still needs to be done. Hayden White, Professor of Historical Studies, Emeritus, University of California, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University 'Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture' achieves the impossible. Miraculously, it brings together an impressive range of material, a sensitivity to multiple histories, a refreshingly innovative approach and a practical usefulness for students. Prof Mary Eagleton, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture offers student and researchers in gender and media studies a clear and lucid overview of recent trends in theory and analysis. This vibrant, wide-ranging and brilliantly researched collection of essays is essential reading for anyone wanting an accessible but sophisticated guide to the very latest issues and concepts in cultural theory. It gathers the very best recent work of the field and provides a useful mapping of an increasingly complex terrain. Prof. Claire Colebrook, University of Edinburgh

 Unpublished conference paper.