Search results for "posthuman"
showing 10 items of 63 documents
Koiran mielen arvoitus ja kerronta
2014
Tämä pro gradu -tutkielma tarkastelee koiran mielen representointia kaunokirjallisessa kerronnassa. Tutkielma keskittyy todellisten koirien representointiin ja pohtimaan aihettaan teorian näkökulmasta. Se käsittelee myös viittä koirista kertovaa kirjaa, jotka havainnollistavat teoreettisia huomioita. Tutkielman teoriataustana toimivat kognitiivinen narratologia, zoonarrattologia sekä laajempi posthumanistinen viitekehys. Eläinten käyttäytymistä tutkiva etologia tarjoaa tutkielmalle tietoa luonnontieteellisestä käsityksestä koiran mielestä. Koiran mielen representointi vaikuttaa sekä siihen, mitä koirista kerrotaan, että siihen, miten niistä kerrotaan. Koska olemme koiriin kumppanuuslajisuht…
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…
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 New Media and Heterotopic Technologies in the Philippines
2008
Information overload is perhaps the most common frustration of our age. It strikes everyone: young and old, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, first world and third world. Human communication has taken on the qualities of the supernatural. Indeed it has surpassed it! Zeus could only rely on Mercury’s speed to convey his commands; presently electronic messages zip around the globe and the universe at the speed of light. No wonder that new communication technologies often evoke notions of the supernatural. This paper deals with some of the unexpected effects of the new communication technologies, in particular for mobile phones. While the mobile has become the icon of connectedness, it a…
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…
Disability, illness and physical activity: a (post)qualitative research
2019
This PhD thesis is an assemblage of papers addressing 1) disability, illness and physical activity; and 2) (post)qualitative inquiry. The thesis tackles the case of Patrick, a man living with poor prognostic cancer and paraplegia. Overall, it examines in-depth how narrative and material forces acted by shaping Patrick’s struggle of becoming, and which role physical activity played in his life post-diagnosis. Data was obtained from life-story interviews, participant-produced images in different formats and object interviews, as well as three years of informal interactions with Patrick. The selection of data collection techniques was subjected to ethical considerations meant to preserve Patri…
Sopravvivenze del mimetismo animale: lo sguardo, l’aptico e il postumano
2022
La ricerca di Roger Caillois sul mimetismo animale, avviata in ambito surrealista già negli anni Trenta, si fondava su alcuni interessi per l’entomologia e le società primitive, su solidi studi sul mito e alcune incursioni nella psicopatologia, mentre le spiegazioni fornite riconducevano il fenomeno a una necessità di assimilazione allo spazio e a una inerzia dello slancio di vita, in aperto contrasto con le teorie darwiniane della selezione naturale. Una interpretazione non utilitaristica faceva del mimetismo un “lusso dispendioso” di alcune specie animali che, per ragioni non adattive, mettono in campo alcune tipologie precise di comportamenti: l’invisibilità, il travestimento e l’initimi…