Reading (through) COVID-19: Toward a posthumanist strategy in higher education

By focusing on the posthumanist trends in higher education, this chapter suggested an alternative reading of the pandemic lockdown that might open new possibilities for education in and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. For this, three questions have been addressed: (1) How can we make sense of the COVID-19 situation? (2) What is the historical context in which COVID-19 has upended the world? (3) Why does posthumanist education matter in the post-COVID-19 era? Reading COVID-19 as an agent, an event, and an exposure in the posthuman condition, the chapter showed that the posthumanist education strategy post the pandemic must be based on the following four pillars: understand, explore, respond, and share. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

Household curricula during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A collective biography

Households with school‐aged children worldwide were affected by school closures caused by COVID‐19. Using a sociomaterial orientation and collective biography methodology, this study examined the household curricula of diverse families in Ontario, Canada with children in pre‐school through Grade 12. It found two distinct curricular phases to the pandemic, each with its own networked constituents, movements, and effects. Phase I involved learning at home during the lockdown in Spring and Summer 2020;Phase II involved online and face‐to‐face learning in the Fall of 2020. The constituents involved in curriculum making in Phase I were expansive and unexpected. Multiple timescales, modes, languages, and knowledge disciplines assembled to (re)configure households as learning spaces that produced novel opportunities for children's knowing, doing, and being. The makeup and movements of the Phase II assemblages were more of a return to the normalized boundaries of implemented school curricula that demarcated subject areas, languages, learning/play, learning/assessment, and body/mind. Concerned with questions of equity in/through curriculum, this study suggests a curriculum paradigm that foregrounds learners' and teachers' engagement with sociomaterial lifeworlds and their ethical relationship building with the more‐than‐human and the world. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Comradely Exchanges: Aleksandr Bogdanov's Physiological Collectivism and Community Reimagined

This article examines Soviet theorist Aleksandr Bogdanov's physiological collectivism, which builds around the idea of mutual blood exchange as a method of eroding borders between individuals to increase the resilience of the social organism as a whole;and reconceptualizes community as a network of material connections between the cells of said organism. The COVID-19 pandemic increased interest in convalescent plasma (CP). This article examines the physiological collective together with theorists like Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway as a basis for how convalescent plasma can function as a first step towards establishing material community today. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Navigating (Post-)Anthropocenic Times of Crisis: A Critical Cartography of Hope

Departing from the (post-)Anthropocenic crisis state of today's world, fuelled by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various post-truth populist follies, and an apocalyptic WW3-scenario that has been hanging in the air since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this article argues for the possibility – and necessity – of an affirmative posthumanist-materialist mapping of hope. Embedded in the Deleuzoguattarian-Braidottian (see Deleuze and Guattari 2005 [1980];Braidotti 2011 [1994]) methodology of critical cartography, and infused with critical posthumanist, new materialist, and queer theoretical perspectives, this cartography of hope is sketched out against two permacrisis-infused positionalities: nostalgic humanism and tragic (post-)humanism. Forced to navigate between these two extremes, the critical cartography of hope presented here explores hope in nume-rous historico-philosophical (re-)configurations: from the premodern ‘hope-as-all-too-human', to a more politicised early modern ‘hope-as-(politically-)human' – representing hope's first paradigm shift (politicisation), and from a four decades-long neoliberal redrawing of hope as ‘no-more-hope' – hope's second shift (depoliticisation) – to a critical (new) materialist plea to de-anthropocentrise and re-politicise hope – hope's third and final post-Anthropocenic shift (re-politicisation). By mapping these (re-)configurations of hope, a philosophical plea is made for hope as a material(ist) praxis that can help us better understand – and counter – these extractive late capitalist, neoliberal more-than-human crisis times. © Edinburgh University Press.

Posthumanist stylistics

I present a posthumanist approach to literary interpretation using stylistic analysis. It is posthumanist since i) digital cameras/audio-video resources and editing applications prompt multimodal readings of literary works unlikely from human intuition alone;ii) anthropocentrism in literary texts is defamiliarised. I highlight how stylistic analysis can be used productively for developing multimodal creativity in posthumanist reading by motivating audio-video edits and effects. I model using Anne Brontë's poem ‘Home' (1846). When read only with intuition, ‘Home' communicates young Brontë's yearning for her family home. In contrast, this article has a non-intuitive digital multimodal realisation of this poem where a young Californian stuck in London because of pandemic (Covid-19) travel restrictions yearns for her home state in the aftermath of wildfires linked to anthropogenic climate change. This posthumanist transformative reading, flagging the negative repercussions of humans for their planetary home, defamiliarises the poem's anthropocentric normality. Importantly, I show how stylistic analysis of ‘Home' motivates creative use of audio-visual edits and effects in the posthumanist multimodal reading. The article makes contrast with standard interpretive practice in stylistics (‘humanist stylistics'). It also reflects on the value of posthumanist stylistics for extending students' creative thinking in an educational context. © The Author(s) 2023.

Posthuman and pandemic elements in the feminist retellings of fairy tales in Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles

Fairy tales have transcended time, space, context and their original media of propagation. Retelling or reworking familiar fairy-tale tropes has long been a literary tradition which still enjoys a position of popularity in contemporary times. This process revivifies seamlessly the literary endeavours of the ancient as well as the medieval authors. This paper explores how the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, while being a feminist retelling of fairy tales, deals with posthuman concepts of biological warfare, genetic modifications, cyborgs and authoritarian autocratic regimes, set in the context of a raging pandemic sometime in the future retaining considerable literary integrity. The novels draw on the fairy tales of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White, and chronicle the eponymous female protagonists Cinder, Scarlet, Cress and Winter who take action, claim agency and collaborate to bring down the autocratic regime of the Lunar Queen Levana who in pursuit of sole ownership of natural resources, engages in murder, ruthlessly creating genetically modified hybrid super soldiers and a bio engineered pandemic. This study chronicles the posthuman facets which set the works in the foreseeable future. This paper also identifies and analyses the similarities between the strands of the fictional Letumosis pandemic and the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the significance in how fictional works can predict human response. These fairy tale retellings go to demonstrate that the tales sustain their relevance through reinterpretations and retellings that address contemporary concerns. © 2022 The Korean Association of Speech-Language Pathologists.

Zooming with Babies: Troubling a Shared Present

This paper outlines how the specific constraints of virtual communication technology have stirred new thinking around what kind of research and what knowledge is produced with babies. During Zoom sessions, the 2–4-month-old babies were frequently present but out of shot, or glimpsed as a small limb or movement or sound on the other side of the screen. The babies' bodies, movements, and sounds exceeded the boundaries of the screen. Through a posthuman lens, presence, time, and agency unravel the Zoom screen as an active participant that interferes with what can happen in a shared present in a liminal space.

Family literacies during the COVID-19 lockdown: Semiotic assemblages and meaning making at home

When home became the primary place for children's learning during the COVID-19 lockdown, a dominant rhetoric emerged about a literacy-skills crisis, especially involving learners from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse families. By documenting the literacies practiced and the literacy-learning opportunities created in and among households during the lockdown in the spring and summer of 2020, this study turns this deficit-oriented rhetoric on its head. Conducted by parents with their children (aged 2-15), this collective biography found that during the lockdown households were forced into spaces that were physically constrained yet replete with a wide range of semiotic resources. Parents and children used these resources, which included multiple modes, media, and languages, to produce expansive literacies and literacy-learning opportunities. The present study offers suggestions about how to recognize and build on learners' linguistic, cultural, and semiotic repertoires in the creation of literacy curricula. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

We Refuse to Cope! The Vitruvian Nurse, the Code of Conduct, and Nurses' Lived Knowledge

We, as nurses, refuse to cope. In this editorial style piece we discuss the ongoing crisis in nursing and the ways in which this situation is being produced. We discuss the metaphors with which nursing is produced in the UK and US and how these metaphors produce an idealized version of nurses and nursing that is impossible. We situate this metaphor in critical posthuman theory by drawing comparisons to Braidotti's (2013) understanding of the idealised human as an axiom of social production under advanced capitalist societies. We make comparisons of this idealized person with the idealized nurses that are captured in nursing codes of conduct and practice. We then suggest ways in which we can resist and diffract metaphors in nursing to produce affirmative futures.

Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing: More than human genes, more than market promotion

Transhumanism advocates enhancement of current human capacities with new technologies, in pursuit of human improvement and perfection, and thereby creates lucrative marketing opportunities. We use the broader concept of posthumanism, which includes this, but also all the other ways in which humans are enhanced by non-humans. However, our study is not about posthumanism, but about how a posthumanist critique can enhance our analyses and diagnoses. We consider not just technology, but also other species such as our microbiome, in an effort to critically examine transhumanist marketing, and develop analytic tools to better understand it. The limitations are highlighted with an extended example of the marketing of health information in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Transhumanist marketing is distinguished between "ends”, promoting products, and "means”, as ways to facilitate marketing. We offer a typology of motivations for consumption of transhumanist goods and services.Alternate abstract: Il transumanismo sostiene l'incremento delle attuali capacità umane attraverso le nuove tecnologie, alla ricerca del miglioramento e del perfezionamento umani, quindi crea opportunità di marketing redditizie. In questo saggio facciamo ricoroso al concetto più ampio di postumanismo, che include il transumanismo ma anche tutti gli altri modi in cui gli umani possono essere perfezionati dai non umani. Tuttavia, il saggio non riguarda il postumanismo in sé, ma il modo in cui una critica postumanista può far avanzare le nostre analisi e diagnosi. Consideriamo non solo la tecnologia, ma anche altre specie come il nostro microbioma, nel tentativo di esaminare criticamente il marketing transumanista e sviluppare strumenti analitici per comprenderlo meglio. I suoi limiti sono evidenziati attraverso l'esempio del marketing delle informazioni sanitarie in risposta alla pandemia da Covid-19. Il marketing transumanista può essere distinto tra "fini” – vale a dire la promozione di prodotti – e "mezzi”, intesi come modi per facilitare il marketing. Il saggio propone una tipologia delle motivazioni che inducono al consumo di beni e servizi transumanisti.

Challenging the logic of lifesaving in the intensive care unit.

Intensive care units are considered life-saving medical services and a vital component of healthcare systems. These specialized hospital wards contain the life support machines and technical expertise to sustain seriously ill and injured bodies. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, intensive care is an expensive, finite resource which is not necessarily available to all citizens, and which may be unjustly rationed. As a result, the intensive care unit may contribute more towards biopolitical narratives of investment in lifesaving than measurable improvements in population health. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and a decade of involvement in clinical research, this paper examines everyday activities of lifesaving in the intensive care unit and interrogates epistemological assumptions upon which they are organized. A closer look at how healthcare professionals, medical devices, patients, and families accept, refuse, and modify imposed boundaries of bodily finitude reveals how activities of lifesaving often lead to uncertainty and may even impose harm when they deny possibilities for desired death. Refiguring death as a personal ethical threshold, rather than inherently tragic ending, challenges the power of the logic of lifesaving and instead insists on greater attention towards improving conditions for living.

Earbuds, smartphones, and music. Spiritual care and existential changes in COVID-19 times.

Rooted in a Durkheimian functionalist reading of religion, in this article, we present and discuss the results of a scoping study of on-line sources on the delivery of spiritual care during the COVID-19 pandemic in England. Spiritual care highlights the bond between healthcare and religion/spirituality, particularly within the growing paradigm of holistic and humane care. Spiritual care is also an area where the importance of the physical presence of receivers and providers is exceptionally important, as a classic anthropological understanding of the religious ritual would maintain. Three themes were found, which speak to changes brought about by the pandemic. These revolve around disembodiment, solitude, and technology in spiritual care, of religious and non-religious nature. A fourth theme encapsulates the ambivalence in the experience of spiritual care delivery, whereby distant and virtual care could only partially compensate for the impossibility of physical presence. On the one hand, we draw from anthropology of the ritual and phenomenology to make the case for the inalienability of intercorporeality in being there for the other. On the other hand, relying on digital religious studies and post-human theories, we argue for an opening up to new ways of conceptualising the body, being there, and being human.

Spread the word: mattertext as bio-art

The recent material turn in the posthumanities has foregrounded the idea that agency is not unique to humans but is a shared capacity of all bodily natures of the planet. With this convolution–or rather the deconstruction–of the conventional ways of producing knowledge, the research methodologies at hand have experienced a turn towards a postqualitative mindset, which revolves around the idea of diffraction rather than reflection, and becoming-with the object of analysis, thus necessitating the involvement of the so-called knowing subject into their own research. Bridging the ontological gap between the observer and the observed, the posthumanist/new materialist theories underline the inextricable links between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and matter and text. Built on these premises, this article presents two vignettes enmeshed with the theoretical concepts from the posthumanities and thereby diffractively reads Laura Splan's bio-artistic practices on SARS-CoV-2 as embodiments of what the author calls "mattertextuality.” Splan's work creates conversations between the artistic and the scholarly, while the artist's engagement with her own work enhances further dialogues with the author's academic research on her coined term, "mattertext.”. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Responding to crises: rewilding accounting education for the Anthropocene

PurposeResponding to COVID-19, this conceptual paper uses rewilding to interrupt anthropocentric and human/nature dualist properties of accounting education. Through rewilding accounting education, informed by posthumanist and ecofeminist thought, this paper aims to develop an accounting pedagogy that shapes greater ecocentric narratives. Accounting educators can contribute to addressing crises by evolving new pedagogies that radically transform the education of future accounting professionals.Design/methodology/approachThe authors take a critical stance in analysing the human-centred accounting education model. They explore how this model can be reimagined through rewilding accounting education, resulting in learning interventions that foster an understanding of intrinsic value, complexity of systems and collective disposition with all species and the natural world.FindingsRewilding learning interventions embed an ecocentric approach in accounting curricula design to extend beyond a human focus. Rewilding learning interventions practically explored with application to accounting include learning with and from nature, Indigenous knowledge perspectives, play as a common language and empathy as a dialogical bridge.Social implicationsThe authors present an accounting pedagogy that fosters among accounting students and educators a relational orientation and ecological consciousness that encompasses compassion and openness to others, including non-human species and nature. This will ensure that accounting graduates are better prepared for addressing future crises that stem from our disconnect with nature.Originality/valueThis paper adds to limited research investigating accounting and the Anthropocene. Investigations into the Anthropocene's human-centred discourse in accounting education are vital to respond adequately to crises. This paper extends social and environmental accounting education literature to encompass less anthropocentric discourse and greater relational learning.

‘Creatures in our bed': Pandemics, posthumanism and predatory nature in World War Z (2013)

This article provided a literary analysis of the film text World War Z (2013, dir. Marc Forster) with a specific focus on the pandemic depicted in the film and its relationship to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This discussion foregrounded the figure of the ‘zombie' and the cultural anxieties that this literary figure represents. The pandemic in the film is brought about through an environmental crisis that mimics our own. Mother Earth and nature, personified as female, feature significantly in the film and evoke a discussion on survival, human nature versus animal nature and the figure of the posthuman. This article also employed a cultural studies approach to analyse how the pandemic depicted in the film evokes a Christian religious dimension through a particular scene that takes place in the Holy Land, Jerusalem. The film's depiction of pandemics, religion and the environmental crisis makes it worthy of discussion, especially in light of the current pandemic that the world is facing, with particular focus on humanity's response to it. The dystopian warnings that the film projects have echoes of the current social and ecological challenges that we are grappling with. The conclusion of the film deviates from the ‘happy endings' indicative of Hollywood;rather, it engages with a situation where a temporary, substandard solution is found to an ongoing world-wide catastrophe. The ending of the film draws intriguing parallels to our own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and the absence of a cure. Contribution: This article provided a literary analysis of a film text. The discussion drew on cultural studies, popular culture and religion through the lens of Christianity, with a particular focus on the social and cultural anxieties that the figure of the ‘zombie' holds as well as cultural interpretations of Mother Earth and nature as female. © 2023. The Author.

Spread the word: mattertext as bio-art

The recent material turn in the posthumanities has foregrounded the idea that agency is not unique to humans but is a shared capacity of all bodily natures of the planet. With this convolution–or rather the deconstruction–of the conventional ways of producing knowledge, the research methodologies at hand have experienced a turn towards a postqualitative mindset, which revolves around the idea of diffraction rather than reflection, and becoming-with the object of analysis, thus necessitating the involvement of the so-called knowing subject into their own research. Bridging the ontological gap between the observer and the observed, the posthumanist/new materialist theories underline the inextricable links between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and matter and text. Built on these premises, this article presents two vignettes enmeshed with the theoretical concepts from the posthumanities and thereby diffractively reads Laura Splan's bio-artistic practices on SARS-CoV-2 as embodiments of what the author calls "mattertextuality.” Splan's work creates conversations between the artistic and the scholarly, while the artist's engagement with her own work enhances further dialogues with the author's academic research on her coined term, "mattertext.”. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The relational agency of plants in produce supply chains during COVID-19: "Mother nature takes her course".

The Ontario Food Terminal is a central node in the North American food system, the third largest wholesale produce market on the continent. During the first 20 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, qualitative research was conducted with food system actors to understand the impact of the public health crisis on produce supply chains. This paper contributes to the study of nonhumans in agri-food networks and rural spaces, specifically human-plant relations. Employing a posthumanist lens to investigate why produce supply chains continued to flow during the pandemic, it is argued that plants helped to keep supply chains moving at the Terminal in the face of crisis. Plant agency in this case is found to be the product of relationships with humans as well as nonhuman systems. This agency is collective in nature and is rooted in the plants' relationships with humans as perishable foods and commodities as well as ecosystem relationships. Further, the paper demonstrates how plant agency, that had political effects during the pandemic, is normalizing. This underlines the importance of considering the nature of the relationship in the context of relational agency, and highlights that it cannot be assumed that plants are allies in food system change.

Our New Fragility: Pandemic, Ethics, and the "Biomedical Others”

This paper is dedicated to the concept of fragility as a constitutive structure of the contemporary subject of the pandemic period. COVID-19 has once again actualized the problems of modern philosophy: the boundaries between human and animal, nature and culture, "self” and "alien”. Based on Levinasian phenomenological ethics, I propose the concept of bioethics as the embodied science of "biomedical Others” — people whose experience cannot be normalized and inscribed in the intersubjective structure of the life world of healthy individuals. The negative consequences of coronavirus for psychophysical health show that during a pandemic every person can become different — by contracting an infection or interrupting habitual social ties due to self-isolation. This proves the work of destructive plasticity — a transformation of the subject in which she becomes radically different, examples of which can be considered not only with the brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases but also with the consequences of coronavirus. The transformed subject is such a "biomedical Other”, she needs an empathic and hospitable bio-ethics based on an expanded understanding of the boundaries of "self” and "other”. This subject represents the "grounding” of contingency, which has become an important concept of recent philosophy. A brief outline of bio-ethics illustrates an attempt to "phenomenologize” contingency, linking it with the anthropological possibility of plastic transformation, which can have both creative and destructive dimensions. Bioethics works with contingency, without turning it into a metaphysical concept and without trying to fit it into the framework of biomedically drawn normativity. Immune hospitality provides a framework for the acceptance of "biomedical Others” as the realization of the diversity of the forms of human embodiment. © 2022, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

‘Creatures in our bed': Pandemics, posthumanism and predatory nature in World War Z (2013)

This article provided a literary analysis of the film text World War Z (2013, dir. Marc Forster) with a specific focus on the pandemic depicted in the film and its relationship to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This discussion foregrounded the figure of the ‘zombie' and the cultural anxieties that this literary figure represents. The pandemic in the film is brought about through an environmental crisis that mimics our own. Mother Earth and nature, personified as female, feature significantly in the film and evoke a discussion on survival, human nature versus animal nature and the figure of the posthuman. This article also employed a cultural studies approach to analyse how the pandemic depicted in the film evokes a Christian religious dimension through a particular scene that takes place in the Holy Land, Jerusalem. The film's depiction of pandemics, religion and the environmental crisis makes it worthy of discussion, especially in light of the current pandemic that the world is facing, with particular focus on humanity's response to it. The dystopian warnings that the film projects have echoes of the current social and ecological challenges that we are grappling with. The conclusion of the film deviates from the ‘happy endings' indicative of Hollywood;rather, it engages with a situation where a temporary, substandard solution is found to an ongoing world-wide catastrophe. The ending of the film draws intriguing parallels to our own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and the absence of a cure. Contribution: This article provided a literary analysis of a film text. The discussion drew on cultural studies, popular culture and religion through the lens of Christianity, with a particular focus on the social and cultural anxieties that the figure of the ‘zombie' holds as well as cultural interpretations of Mother Earth and nature as female.

Education in a ‘neoliberalised’ online teaching and learning space: Towards an affirmative ethics

The sudden mass migration of teaching, learning and assessment to the digital terrain because of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the global proliferation of scholarship. This scholarship ranges from romantic notions of the opportunity to revivify curriculum and pedagogy in what was deemed an underutilised educational technology (online) resource space to scholarship contemptuous of this newfound romance. This has exposed the potential affordances of online teaching and its adjunctive exclusionary effects. Whilst the authors recognise the short-term benefits of adapting advanced technology for educational purposes, they provoke the question as to the obliterative potential of technology for the human (university academics in this instance) and the non-human/more-than-human. It is, however, without contention that the neoliberal university, driven by the economic viability and sustainability imperative, gives precedence to curriculum delivery and student support to secure degree completion targets even within academic timeframe (year) constraints. As such, it is likely to neglect the cogent matter of the affective as it relates to both academics, students and the non-human. In this conceptual article, Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanist perspective is drawn upon, offering both critical and affirmative propositions for moving forward in engagement with technologies in emerging educational online spaces. Firstly, critical perspectives are offered on some challenges of the neoliberal contouring and new regimes of accountability and surveillance that appear to have become more efficacious in the digital space. Secondly, it is acknowledged that humans live in a technologically mediated world and need to navigate this world in productive ways. Braidotti’s philosophy of affirmative ethics helps us to invigorate affordances of educational technology that are hopeful. This article’s contribution lies in alternative imaginings of educational technology, so that technology can be used in ways that advance pedagogical lives and social relations. © 2022. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS. This work.