Dr Alison Sperling of Technische Universität Berlin presented work on Weid Queer Ecologies.

The presentation might come available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCceWDyovuMbKpYVgiKYI_gw 

First of all, it has been a fantastic time at KTH with new and old collaborations across disciplines, paving the way for the reinvented, new humanities of societal relevance. The Posthumanities Hub (PH) has since March 2018 until February 2021 had its main institutional home at KTH, where our founding director Cecilia Åsberg worked as Guest Professor in Science and Technology Studies focusing on Gender and Environment. Dr. Janna Holmstedt, artistic director and coordinator, has worked at KTH as research engineer since May 2019, and co-director Dr. Marietta Radomska has been based at Linköping University and Helsinki University.

As a research group and network of networks for philosophy, arts, and sciences informed by advanced cultural critique and creativity, we host visiting researchers, public events, seminars and symposia. From such collaborative vantage points, we bring science and nonhumans to the humanities, and transformational humanities to the people. The Posthumanities Hub collaborates with other institutions through our research group, visiting scholars, affiliated researchers, advisory board, and international networks. For instance, during these three years we have worked with Bonniers Konsthall and Färgfabriken in Stockholm, the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Lofoten Art Festival in Norway, the International Science Festival in Göteborg, The Public Art Agency Sweden, the Finnish Bioart Society, and UNESCO World Humanities: Europe, to mention a few.We have been giving talks, PhD responses, and keynotes, at Swedish and international universities, art events, research conferences, and at the Swedish Radio. We have hosted more than 20 seminars at KTH as part of The Posthumanities Hub Seminar Series, which since 2020 have been taking place online, with the number of participants skyrocketing from 30 to 150.

Marietta Radomska has set up a sub-group of the Posthumanities Hub, focusing on Eco- and Bioart research. Janna Holmstedt has initiated the Humus Economicus Collaboratory, focusing on human-soil relations. Cecilia Åsberg and Hub-researcher Christina Fredengren are finalizing the project Checking in with Deep Time, and Åsberg will explore AI and the Artistic Imaginary with André Holzapfel and Bob Sturm, KTH.

Among the varied activities we have engaged in besides research are:

• Open Humanities Lab Symposium: New Humanities and Anthropocene we organized at KTH, with 25 extra-ordinary speakers (2019)

• a mixed and postdisciplinary gathering of artists and researchers on the theme of /Mis/communication/s/ in KTH’s Reaktorhallen, curated by Janna Holmstedt on invitation by The Public Art Agency Sweden (2019);

• PH has been a proud partner and participant in The Kelp Congress, Lofoten International Festival (LIAF), NO (2019), the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University, Canada, and the State of the Art Network, a Nordic-Baltic network of artists, practitioners, researchers, and organizations exploring the role, responsibility, and potential of art and culture in the Anthropocene (2018 –present).

• We’ve initiated two Formas Communication Projects (Åsberg) involving students, in collaboration with Bromma gymnasium, Färgfabriken in Stockholm and Art Lab Gnesta.

Our teaching focuses on gender, environment and sustainability. We were proud to inherit Gender and Technology (Åsberg), a flagship course of the Division that we ran 2019 – 2020 with students doing MAs in engineering. In 2020 we started up the new PhD course Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities with Meike Schalk at KTH School of Architecture, with over 30 participants from many corners of the world. Both courses were very highly rated and appreciated, to the degree of forming new lively phd-networks (Genderation for Future Sustainability Network).

Read more about the research group,our companions, seminars, projectsand events here:http://posthumanities.net/http://www.facebook.com/posthumanitieshub/

Director and founder:Cecilia Åsberg, KTH/LiU.co-director:Marietta Radomska, LiU.artistic director and coordinator:Janna Holmstedt, KTH.senior strategic advisor:Christina Fredengren, SU. Ragnar Holm postdoc:Lina Rahm, KTH. 

What does it mean to study supposedly global media phenomena from a Nordic perspective? In which ways could a Nordic feminist perspective on digital media make a difference in relation to dominant research traditions? What would be particular and unique about Nordic cyberfeminism   compared to the  unmarked  version of cyberfeminism dominating the field today? These are some of the questions that this book sets out to answer. Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Digital Media and Gender in a Nordic Context pushes the boundaries of contemporary cyberfeminism significantly. Against the background of an expanding body of research in the field of digital media and gender   which to this date has primarily been carried out from an Anglo-American perspective   the book argues that feminist studies of digital media need to become more inclusive and aware of their own geographical and cultural biases and limits. The book takes as its point of departure the knowledge and experiences from the Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark. Although often grouped together under the assumed homogeneity of Scandinavia, there are important differences between the countries   but also certain qualities and aspects that run across national borders, which make for an intriguing foundation of this book.  Highlighting the work of several of Scandinavia's best internet researchers, this collection shows how our understanding of the intersection of gender and computer technology is both universal and cultural. It's fascinating reading for anyone interested in questions of gender, culture, or social aspects of the internet and serves as a useful corrective for those who assume these issues can be understood without considering them from multiple cultural positions.  Nancy Baym, Associate professor of Communication Studies, University of Kansas.  This is a very illuminating, unconventional and agenda-setting collection of essays by a new generation of scholars. Very Nordic in its pragmatic approach, egalitarian spirit and scholarly excellence, it manages to strike a global note. The range, depth and scope of the theoretical concerns, coupled with the originality of the themes discussed casts a new light on a number of crucial issues in feminist cultural studies of science and technology. A delight to read!  Rosi Braidotti,  Distinguished professor in the Humanities, Utrecht University.

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke (University of Chester, UK), one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies (HAS). This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated material turn of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birkes oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice.

This companion is a cutting-edge primer to critical forms of the posthumanities and the feminist posthumanities, aimed at students and researchers who want to catch up with the recent theoretical developments in various fields in the humanities, such as new media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, human animal studies, postcolonial critique, philosophy and environmental humanities. It contains a collection of nineteen new and original short chapters introducing influential concepts, ideas and approaches that have shaped and developed new materialism, inhuman theory, critical posthumanism, feminist materialism, and posthuman philosophy. A resource for students and teachers, this comprehensive volume brings together established international scholars and emerging theorists, for timely and astute definitions of a moving target – posthuman humanities and feminist posthumanities.

In this chapter, Åsberg and Braidotti, delineates the geneaologies of feminist posthumanities, drawing on cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies but also environmental, medical and digital humanities as these are enlivningen the contemporary interdisciplinary humanities with critique, creativity and curiosity.

In the concluding chapter (chapter 17 of EUP's book The Edinburgh Companion to the New Humanities, written by Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti, the emergence and need for versatile forms of feminist posthumanities is mapped out. Åsberg and Braidotti, building on their respective previous works on feminist posthumanities and the posthuman in feminist philosophy, describe and introduce a multi-valent new field of research fields within and beyond the new humanities. 

This is an interview done by previous Seed Box/Posthumanities Hub postdoc, Dr Olga Cielemecka (University of Tartu) with prof Cecilia Åsberg. In a conversation on what the arts of sustainability can offer in the Anthropocene, Åsberg is presented as a feminist scholar of environmental humanities, posthumanities and other forms of the new humanitie. Äsberg has pionnered planetary humanities thinking and has been part of the early international EH research interest in the oceanic, in critical ocean studies, blue humanities or even the oceanic and coastal humanities (many terms are afloat),  along with a handful of other feminist environmental humanities scholars. Åsberg points to the emminent pioneers, such as Stacey Alaimo and Elizabeth de Loughrey - and of course (from the 1950s) Rachel Carson herself, and to the many interconnections between feminist new materialism and environmental humanities today.  

  Det är många kvinnor i den akademiska pyramidens bas men få i dess topp. Rapporten undersöker studenters övergång från grundutbildning till forskarutbildning. Finns det något i övergången som påverkar kvinnors och mäns val? Rapporten bygger på enkätsvar från och intervjuer med studenter.

This chapter takes departure in the experience gathered through our participation in two workshops: Kelp Curing and Coast, Line, forming part of the Kelp Congress, as well as our daily research and art practices.

We take kelp as material entities immersed in a multitude of relations with other creatures (for whom kelp serves as both nourishment and shelter) and inorganic elements of the milieu it resides in, on the one hand, and as a figuration: a material-semiotic “map of contestable worlds” that encompasses entangled threads of “knowledge, practice and power” (Haraway 1997, 11) in its local and global sense, on the other. While drawing on our field notes from the congress and feminist posthumanities and environmental humanities literatures (e.g. Alaimo 2016; Åsberg & Braidotti 2018; Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Iovino & Opperman 2014)  – with a special focus on the so-called blue humanities/oceanic humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019) – that unpack human/nonhuman relations in the context of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), we mobilise a reflection on and make a proposal for “thinking with kelp” as a multi-faceted methodology of transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge production and practices: situated (Haraway 1988), enfleshed, transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010), collaborative, and committed to an ethics of multispecies response-ability (Haraway 2008).

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.

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.

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.

POSTHUMANISTISKA NYCKELTEXTER ger i de inledande kapitlen en överblick och en introduktion till posthumanistiska studier och till materiell-semiotik. Här behandlas tankeströmningar som rör det humanas natur, humanismens etik och humanvetenskapernas framtid. Boken ger en introduktion till det som inom genusvetenskap och tekniksociologi kommit att kallas den ontologiska vändningen mot de materiaaliteter och världsliga relationer som både gör och förgör oss. Här kartläggs grunderna för posthumanistiska förhållningssätt till de både mänskliga och icke-mänskliga (djur, miljö, teknik) dimensionerna av vår värld så som de begreppsliggjorts inom filosofi, feministisk teori, kulturstudier och sociala studier av vetenskap och teknik. 

POSTHUMANISTISKA NYCKELTEXTER erbjuder introduktioner till viktiga författare och översättningar av nyckeltexter skrivna av Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze med Felix Guattari, Michel Serres och Annemarie Mol. Boken innehåller även en omfattande ordlista med viktiga nyckelbegrepp som i sig ger en introduktion till ett mångfaldigt forskningsfält.

Using material from the Pfizer sponsored website providing health information on erectile dysfunction to potential Swedish Viagra customers (http://www.potenslinjen.se), this article explores the public image of masculinity in relation to sexual health and the cultural techniques for creating pharmaceutical appeal. We zoom in on the targeted ideal users of Viagra, and the nationalized, racialized and sexualized identities they are assigned. As part of Pfizers marketing strategy of adjustments to fit the local consumer base, the ways in which Viagra is promoted for the Swedish setting is telling of what concepts of masculinity are so stable and unassailable that they can withstand the association with a drug that is, in essence, an acknowledgement of failed masculinity and dysfunctional sexuality. With comparative national examples, this study presents an interdisciplinary take on the glocalized cultural imaginary of Viagra, and the masculine subject positions it engenders.

In this chapter, we will investigate the visual confguration of what we term a  Swedish Viagra imaginary, a cultural phantasy landscape that produces and repro- duces certain subject positions of great interest for feminists and other scholars invested in social change. More precisely, we interrogate a set of key images pre- sented by the Pfzer-sponsored website for potential Swedish Viagra customers with erectile dysfunction in order to explore how this particular Viagra imaginary provides reference points for shared and collective identities. We explore here the  visual formation, and the naturalization, of the nationally shaped masculinity of the potential consumers of Viagra at a Swedish-language site, www.potenslinjen.se/,  the same site discussed in Chapter 6. This site is produced by the pharmaceutical 2 company Pfzer for the explicit purpose of providing the Swedish public with health  information on erectile problems.

Recent stirrings wihin the humanities and the social sciences, perhaps especially within feminist theory, have engendered new materialist, feminist materialist and posthumanist approaches to life worlds that exceeds the limiting horizon of both andro- and anthopocentrism. This position paper maps out some of these recent theoretical trends of a form of feminist post-humanities with special attention paid to material bodies (transcoproreality), non-human animals and other organisms we are intimately related to, non-human agents of the world, and the environment (environmental humanities).

Vi menar i den här korta essän att öar, som det planerade, offentliga konstverket Future Island, har mycket att lära oss. De tränar vår förmåga att se stora sammanhang, ”connect the dots”. Med öar,som per definition ligger vid marginalerna av fast mark eller till och med långt ute till havs, tränas vår föreställningsförmåga. Det behövs nu när vi måste anpassa oss på nytt, till en miljö- och klimatförändrad värld. Nu när vi måste lära oss leva med ovissa klimatframtider behövs testscenarion och projektionsytor för tänkbara framtider, som Future Island-verket. Här har vetenskap och tekniken självklar plats – i egenskap av datainsamling och observationer av möjliga scenarier. Men för att verkligen öva vår föreställningsförmåga, och därmed vår anpassningsförmåga, i en redan miljöförändrad värld, krävs mer än disparat information. Det behövs mer än tekniska beräkningar, vetenskapliga övervakningssystem och informativa utbildningsinsatser. Nu krävs inlevelse, fantasiförmåga, spekulationer, nya horisonter och nya sätt att se sammanhang. Inte minst krävs avoss alla idag konsten att leva med det okända, det omätbara.

Alzheimers disease (AD) may be situated within a cultural landscape produced, in part, by demographics and the marketing strategies of an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry. The simultaneously corporeal and visual domain of advertisements for anti-AD drugs generates dynamic images of gender and embodiment, and it also lends itself to feminist interventions engaging with the images and ideas circulating around aging, medicine and the body. In this article, we investigate advertisements targeting medical practitioners treating patients with AD. Working within a methodological framework we identify as feminist visual studies of technoscience, we want to propel the discussion in the direction of a broader corpus of medical media. Through this limited exercise, we hope to make a scholarly contribution to the feminist community by critiquing some of the images emerging within popular/scientific media with regard to Alzheimers, a disease collectively imagined within an aging Western population.

Alzheimers disease (AD) is emerging into public view in unprecedented ways. Foremost among these is the embodied form of elderly men and women appearing in commercial imagery for patient advocacy groups or pharmaceutical advertisements, but scientific imagery also seeps into the visual media cultures that surround us. The recent reconfiguration of Alzheimers disease is due to expanding ageing populations, an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry becoming a fast-growing material-semiotic realm that is providing powerful images of both gendered and racialized embodiment. Such a visual, and yet highly material, realm is in need of feminist interventions, engaging with the images and ideas that circulate around ageing, medicine, human and non-human embodiment. From a non-representationalist (figural realist) and posthumanist perspective identified as feminist visual studies of technoscience, the authors seek to further the discussion in the direction of understanding the scattered ontologies of Alzheimers - in laboratory practice, the realm of medical media and in commercial appeals to coherent individuality and human cognition - as gendered domains of figural reality and performative matter.

This chapter explores the meaning of "nature" through the modern history of science and contemporary experimental practices from feminist science studies perspectives.  

Taking into account intersecting trends in political, academic, and popular engagements with environmental issues, this paper concerns the development of environmental humanities as an academic field of inquiry, specifically in this new era many are calling the Anthropocene. After a brief outline of the environmental humanities as a field, we delimit four problems that currently frame our relation to the environment, namely: alienation and intangibility; the post-political situation; negative framing of environmental change; and compartmentalization of “the environment” from other spheres of concern. Addressing these problems, we argue, is not possible without environmental humanities. Given that this field is not entirely new, our second objective is to propose specific shifts in the environmental humanities that could address the aforementioned problems. These include attention to environmental imaginaries; rethinking the “green” field; enhanced transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity; and increasing “citizen humanities” efforts.

Environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like ecological disasters usually recognised by the general public, and ‘slow violence’, a type of violence that occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale. Planetary seas and oceans, loaded with cultural meanings of that which ‘hides’ and ‘allows to forget’, are the spaces where such attritional violence unfolds unseen and ‘out of mind’. Simultaneously, conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous entities, become obsolete. We all inhabit and embody the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world. This chapter focuses on subtle ‘slow violence’ unfolding through the instances of submerged chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and high- and low-trophic mariculture in the Baltic and North Sea regions. It zooms in on the select cases of such ‘environed bodies’, their stories of excruciating slow violence and yet also on unexpected encounters with care and hospitality. The aim is to unfold a low-trophic theory for the naturecultural research on violence and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by feminist posthumanities.

BOOK SERIES More Than Human Humanities

The More-Than-Human Humanities focus series aims to attend to human differences entangled with environmental justice, information technologies, AI, synthetic biology, surveillance systems, species extinction, and drastic ecological change. It draws attention not only to the creativity and potentiality of this reinvention of arts and humanities, but also to that which limits or wounds conditions of life on earth. It addresses the question of how we may learn to live with those wounds and limitations in everyday practice. The titles in the series provide insight into the state-of-the art humanities research in a changing world.

First book of this series, Extracting Reconciliation (out Sep 2023), is written by Myra Hird and Hillary Predco.

Extracting Reconciliation: Indigenous Lands, (In)human Wastes, and Colonial Reckoning (full title of book 1 in this series) argues that reconciliation constitutes a critical contemporary mechanism through which colonialism is seeking to ensure continuing access to Indigenous lands and resources.

Series Editors: Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska, Linköping University, Sweden 

Violent but slow changes to marine climates and blue biodiversity, to warming oceans and coastal areas have been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. Instead, this chapter begins from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural studies-informed approaches of more-than-human arts (posthumanities put to practice) to complement scientific insight on how to consume better with the sea. Human-induced impacts range from ocean warming and acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of coastal environments and habitats. In order to deal with the nested challenges of such oceanic environmental violence in terms of consumption and grief, we propose to show four cases of coastal and marine slow violence from our Scandinavian “backyards” with the purpose to story exposures and provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist ocean imaginary. From diverse locations in the field and in research, we have developed what is here referred to as “low trophic theory”, a situated local stance that attends to entanglements of cultural theory, food practice, affect and grief, violence, more-than-human humanities, multispecies ethics, and the oceanic consumer imaginary. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, eco-art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region. In the process, we develop analytical notions for the practices and theories of feminist posthumanities. Here in particular as targeted arts of learning to live and die, consume less violently, and to grieve on a damaged blue planet. 

If the humanities and the arts can be said to be broadly concerned with the self-reflection and understanding of the human species, the posthumanities comes about when we recognise the relationships between the multiple planetary alterations that go sometimes under the name the Anthropocene. We have drastic ecological changes to air, soil and biological reproduction, we have rapid species extinction rates, ubiquitous toxic embodiment and environmental health concerns, and non-sustainable climate changes ahead. Posthumanities also comes about with growing computational systems, security terrors, new biomedical ways of life, re-arranged life forms and synthetic biologies, amongst many many many things. All this impel us to recognise the wider forms and constituents of the condition that is no longer nameable simply as humanity. The world is not the same, now more humanised than ever (perhaps even all too human?), so why should the thinking habits and concepts we live our life by be the same? 

More-than-human feminisms across arts and sciences

Feminist theories have long been concerned with the violent impact of (normative) Universal Man on society and nature, aconsequence of a modern phantasy divide between Nature and Culture. In this planetary era some call the Anthropocene, it isclearer to us how the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. The modern Nature/Culture divideimplodes violently on itself. For too long those regarded as less cultured, less-than-human and particularly nonhumans,like the very ecologies that sustains us, have been approached as mere resours or background for Universal Man. What canbe done - in practice, in thinking and in scholarship in such a situation?The present postnatural situation disrupts modern figurations of thought and scholarly practice, and begs new ones. Withclimate change, oceanic disturbance, habitat loss and rampant species extinction on the one hand, and new syntheticbiologies, technobodies and algorithms we live by on the other, it asks feminist sciences and arts for extradisciplinaryresponses, for new designs of practice.No longer can a division of academic labour be sustained, where technoscience does naked facts, use/abuse nonhumans andextract raw nature while artistic research, humanities and social science does culture, ethics and politics. Spurred by morethan-human feminisms, thicker forms of situated knowing have already emerged, for instance as practices of critical, creativeand feminist posthumanities.Such more-than-human humanities come in response to the pressing need to a) alter and decolonize such dividing knowledgeforms and to b) change the very ways we think, eat, and live with nonhumans in society. Sharing a Darwinian feeling forhow everything is connected, critically and creatively, with a relational ethics of care and concern, more-than-humanfeminisms and postdisciplinary disciplines, have paved way for environmental humanities and other more-than-human formsof the posthumanities. What are the stakes and challenges in these transformations? Why do we need them? And whatfeminist genealogies gets recognized?

G22 Round-table panel, convened by Cecilia Åsberg and The Posthumanities Hub.

Participants:

Cecilia Åsberg1 , Marietta Radomska2 , Christina Fredengren3 , Jesse Peterson4 , Janna Holmstedt5 , Caroline KlingborgElgh 6  and Martin Avila7

1)Professor, Docent, Professor, Tema: Tema Genus, Linköpings Universitet

2) Fil Dr, Biträdande Lektor, Tema: Tema Genus, Linköpings Universitet

3) Professor Konstvetenskapliga Institutionen: Kulturvård, Uppsala Universitet

4) Fil Dr, Postdoktor, Tema Genus, Linköpings universitet and postdok Ekologi, Statens Lantbruksuniversitet

5) Fil Dr, Forskare, Forskningsavdelningen, Statens Historiska Muséer

6) MA, Doktorand, Tema: Tema Genus, Linköpings Universitet

7) Professor, Dr, Professor, Design, Konstfack

Feminist theories have long been concerned with the violent impact of (normative) Universal Man on society and nature, aconsequence of a modern phantasy divide between Nature and Culture. In this planetary era some call the Anthropocene, it isclearer to us how the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. The modern Nature/Culture divideimplodes violently on itself. For too long those regarded as less cultured, less-than-human and particularly nonhumans,like the very ecologies that sustains us, have been approached as mere resours or background for Universal Man. What canbe done - in practice, in thinking and in scholarship in such a situation?The present postnatural situation disrupts modern figurations of thought and scholarly practice, and begs new ones. Withclimate change, oceanic disturbance, habitat loss and rampant species extinction on the one hand, and new syntheticbiologies, technobodies and algorithms we live by on the other, it asks feminist sciences and arts for extradisciplinaryresponses, for new designs of practice.No longer can a division of academic labour be sustained, where technoscience does naked facts, use/abuse nonhumans andextract raw nature while artistic research, humanities and social science does culture, ethics and politics. Spurred by morethan-human feminisms, thicker forms of situated knowing have already emerged, for instance as practices of critical, creativeand feminist posthumanities.Such more-than-human humanities come in response to the pressing need to a) alter and decolonize such dividing knowledgeforms and to b) change the very ways we think, eat, and live with nonhumans in society. Sharing a Darwinian feeling forhow everything is connected, critically and creatively, with a relational ethics of care and concern, more-than-humanfeminisms and postdisciplinary disciplines, have paved way for environmental humanities and other more-than-human formsof the posthumanities. What are the stakes and challenges in these transformations? Why do we need them? And whatfeminist genealogies gets recognized?This lively round-table talk brings diverse scholars together for a spirited conversation on the usefulness and potential impactof feminist theorizing on sustainability, design, and on how to bring art and science to the social humanities, and insights tothe people living in a more-than-human world. It will be fun, but deadly serious.  

Celebrating more than two decades of feminist theory and gender research, this book provides an essential overview of current theoretical positions, hot topics and state-of-the-art perspectives in the field of Nordic Gender Studies: an area currently facing the challenges of internationalization and destabilized well fare states, intersectionality, materiality, and academic transformation.

Forming an overview, the introductory texts collected here are intended for Nordic and international students and teachers specializing in gender studies or related areas of interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. With vibrant contributions from Nordic and international key scholars, think pieces and position papers culled from NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, are in fact essential reading for anyone in need of accessible yet condensed guidance on key discussion points, such as post-constructionism and new materialism, neo-liberal academia and interdisciplinarity, and the role of critical gender theory and posthumanism. The volume also looks at the differences within Nordic Gender Studies of today.

This book is made up of material that was previously published in various issues of NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

In lieu of an abstract:

In this editorial material, we sum up our three years of editorial work for the international peer reviewed journal NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research and discuss the publishing situation for gender scholars.