Search results for "humanismi"

Playing the Nonhuman : Alien Experiences in Aliens vs. Predator

2020

What is it like to play a nonhuman character? In his classic essay, philosopher Thomas Nagel (1975) argues that we are fundamentally unable to imagine what it is like to be a bat, because our senses and cognition are structured in a way that is uniquely human – whereas bats’ senses and cognition have a uniquely bat-like configuration. In spite of this, media genres from fantasy to science-fiction routinely strive to imagine and show what it could be like to be something other than human. What is more, different media achieve this effect by different means: literature provides textual descriptions, audio-visual media rely on moving images, and comics employ different kinds of multimodal comp…

Koronakriisi? Ei, tämä on ihmisyyden kriisi

2022

Wild Things Squeezed in the Closet : Monsters of Children’s Literature as Nonhuman Others

2020

Children and monsters share a similar position in the world dominated by human adults: both are typically represented as animalized, alien creatures that are to be tamed, protected, abused, or repelled. In other words, children and monsters are constructed as different and “other” from the hegemonic standard that is the full-grown, healthy (and typically white) human. Children’s literature thus opens a space where the ethical relationships between humans and nonhumans can be radically reconfigured: the different forms and genres of fiction aimed at infants and youngsters offer wads of intriguing, underutilized material for examining the construction of nonhuman otherness and its complex con…

The Historiae Florentini populi by Poggio Bracciolini. Genesis and Fortune of an Alternative History of Florence

2020

During the last years of his life, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), former Apostolic Secretary and Chancellor of Florence, was working on a long text that he characterized, in a letter written in 1458, as lacking a well-defined structure. This was most probably his history of the people of Florence (Historiae Florentini populi, the title given in Jacopo’s dedication copy to Frederick of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino), revised and published posthumously by Poggio’s son, Jacopo Bracciolini (1442-1478). Contrary to what is often assumed, Poggio’s treatise was not a continuation, nor even a complement, to Leonardo Bruni’s (1370-1444) official history of Florence. It concentrates on the most recent…

Towards Socio-material Research Approaches in Language Education

2022

AbstractThis chapter outlines the socio-material framing of the book that it opens. We situate this volume materially not only in the discipline of applied linguistics and language education, but also in the long tradition of applied language studies at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and the community there. In doing so, the book builds on the authors’ roots in social constructionist thought and explicates why an orientation towards new materialism may be useful for a consideration of equity issues in language education. Socio-materialism fosters a critical, transformative perspective and encourages an ontological ethical grounding of research, thus providing a starting point for re…

The Human and Non-human Interconnectedness in Three Chinese Contemporary Artists

2021

Today, we live in an era known as the Anthropo cene. The interconnectedness between humans and other living entities and environments is an essential part of the theme of the Anthropocene and a central concern in contemporary culture and art. Through the emphasis of the role of non human agents, new materialism and posthuman ism radically problematize the binaries of sub ject/object, human/nonhuman, cultural/natural, and mind/body, and challenge the superiority of the human. Although both Chinese and Western scholars widely acknowledge that Chinese tradi tional culture and art are deeply based on less anthropocentric modes of thinking, the contem porary Chinese artists’ expression of the in…

Material Change : The Case of Co-located Schools

2022

AbstractIn this chapter, our context is a co-located Swedish and Finnish medium high school campus. From a posthumanist viewpoint, we study the roles and functions of language(s) in the semiotic assemblages of learning environments and ask how language(s) feature as an integral and material part of the change in the spatial repertoire of learning environments. We investigate how the principle of separation of schools by medium of instruction, typical for Finnish education, becomes undermined through a new multilingual soundscape in the co-located schools, where the school community hears and uses many languages every day. In doing this, the co-located schools not only challenge Finnish lang…

"Iam nouus in terras alto descendit Olympo Iuppiter” : Patronage and propaganda in the time of Leo X (1513–1521)

2022

Giovanni de’ Medici (1475–1521), son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, was destined to a brilliant ecclesiastical career that eventually led him to the Holy See as pope Leo X (1513–1521). His reign, marked by wars and the emergence of protestantism, was also a period of intense artistic activity in Rome, with Raphael, Michelangelo, Sangallo as well as a plethora of humanist authors engaged in celebrating Leo’s feats. This article explores Leo’s patronage and propaganda, in particular through an analysis of one of the numerous poems dedicated to him by Giano Vitale Castalio of Naples (Ianus Vitalis Castalius, c. 1485–c. 1560) at the beginning of his pontificate. peerReviewed

Posthuman(ist) Feminism, Feminist Posthumanities

2018

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman : Striving for More Ethical Cohabitation

2020

As Donna Haraway (2015, 160) argues, “[i]t matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systemize systems”. The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to diligently conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. peerReviewed