Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Anthropocène – Philosophie'

Depuis plusieurs décennies, une partie de la communauté scientifique observe et dénonce l’ampleur des changements environnementaux anthropogéniques. Un concept récent est issu de ces inquiétudes, qui cristallise l’idée d’une transformation planétaire durable : c’est l’Anthropocène, la proposition de définir une époque géologique nouvelle, faisant suite à l’Holocène, et qui affirme que l’homme est désormais une force géologique. Ce travail avance que l’Anthropocène pousse le dualisme moderne entre la nature et l’homme dans ses derniers retranchements. Dans la première partie, les débats actuels des géologues autour de l’Anthropocène sont examinés, ainsi que les concepts précurseurs à l’Anthropocène. Les multiples dimensions de la « force géologique » sont présentées, ainsi que les conséquences pour la protection de l’environnement. La seconde partie est interprétative. Une typologie des différentes lectures de l’Anthropocène est donnée. Les modalités de la collaboration nécessaire entre les sciences naturelles et les sciences humaines sont examinées. La question du dépassement du dualisme est analysée, en particulier par le renouvellement du rapport au temps que l’Anthropocène impose. Enfin, il est montré en quoi l’Anthropocène nous demande d’adapter nos représentations planétaires. Il n’existe pas de consensus sur la signification de l’Anthropocène, qui est une bénédiction pour les uns, l’annonce d’une catastrophe pour les autres. La thèse offre un regard philosophique et une interprétation originaux sur une question controversée d’une grande actualité
For several decades, part of the scientific community has observed and denounced the magnitude of the anthropogenic environmental change. A recent concept has emerged from these concerns, which crystallises the idea of a lasting planetary transformation: the Anthropocene, the proposal to define a new geological epoch that ends the Holocene, and in which the human being has become a geological force. This work assumes that the Anthropocene brings modern dualism between man and nature to its extreme limits. In the first part, the actual debates from geologists on the Anthropocene are discussed, as well as the precursors. The multiple dimensions of the Ôgeological forceÕ are presented, as well as the consequences for the protection of nature. The second part is interpretative. A typology of different understandings of the Anthropocene is given. The modalities of interdisciplinary work between natural and social sciences are examined. The question of how it is possible to overcome modern dualism is analysed. A special question is to understand how the Anthropocene gives a new meaning to our understanding of time. Finally, it is shown how and why the Anthropocene asks us to adapt our planetary representations. There is no consensus on the meaning of the Anthropocene, which is a blessing for some, the announcement of a disaster for others. The thesis offers a philosophical look and original interpretation on a controversial issue of great news

À l’heure présente, la communauté scientifique des sciences de la Terre, dont les travaux permettent de définir cet âge de l’Anthropocène dans lequel nous prendrions désormais pied, se voit rejointe dans sa démarche par des intellectuels, des artistes, des architectes et/ou des activistes. Beaucoup se distinguent par leur intérêt pour l’expérience, par leur goût pour l’instrumentation, les unités de mesure, les observables, les données, les capteurs… En d’autres termes, ils font leur la nécessité de se doter d’un appareil sensible, quel qu’il soit, afin de requalifier la notion de nature. Un « art comme expérience » se présente alors en tant que connaissance par expérimentation d’une situation où l’ontologie de la relation à la nature est perturbée, altérée sinon bouleversée par l’intrusion de nouveaux êtres et par la modification conséquente de l’échelle de perception et d’action des humains. Du fait des distorsions d’échelles et de temporalités impliquées dans la notion d’Anthropocène, cette connaissance ne peut qu’être enquête. Enquête dessinant de nouveaux cosmogrammes… Si le paradigme d’un art d’investigation au sein d’écologies anthropisées prend consistance, alors il nous faudra tout réévaluer de notre approche esthétique et sensible des tremblements du monde…
Considering the paradigm of the inquiry (as John Dewey's theory defines it) as a specific framework in arts and design, this research analyses the sense-making capacity of art forms in revealing the Anthropocene. Because humanity enters in the age of the Anthropocene —an age defined by all-consuming modes of production and by deep alteration of the Earth equilibriums—, this research describes the ontological modes and apparatus by which arts reconnect with Nature and felt natural environment. How do practices of art and our ways of interpreting art reflect, reverberate, contest, the ecological realities that we now face, in the age of the Anthropocene?

Certains géologues s’accordent à dire que l’Holocène, l’ère géologique d’environ dix mille ans dans laquelle nous nous situons, a laissé sa place à l’Anthropocène, nouvelle couche géologique caractérisée par l’empreinte irréversible de l’activité humaine sur le monde. Cette hypothèse scientifique est corroborée par la crise environnementale qui frappe le monde contemporain et qui met désormais en doute les possibilités de survie de la planète et donc de l’humanité. Depuis quelques décennies, la culture nord-occidentale s’empare de cette réalité anxiogène en la représentant à travers des scénarios fictifs. Ces représentations, diverses et nombreuses, constituent un véritable imaginaire social de la crise environnementale. Cette étude se concentre sur cette représentation plus particulièrement en littérature. Il s’agit d’interroger, à travers l’analyse comparative de huit romans nord-occidentaux (de France, du Canada et des États-Unis), désignés comme des « fictions de l’Anthropocène », comment les œuvres fictives contemporaines participent de l’imaginaire social de la crise environnementale. Ces œuvres reprennent des motifs communs, comme la pollution ou le réchauffement climatique, mais proposent aussi d’explorer des ailleurs fictifs permettant d’imaginer des futurs possibles pour un monde en danger. Elles montrent ainsi en quoi la crise environnementale est fondamentalement liée à notre façon d’habiter le monde. C’est donc une crise de l’humain qui est dévoilée par ces fictions, lesquelles révèlent, à travers une écriture travaillée et un imaginaire puissant, l’intérêt d’une approche spécifiquement littéraire des récits sur notre survie à l’heure de l’Anthropocène
Some geologists argue that the Holocene, our current geological epoch, has now been replaced by the Anthropocene, a new geological time characterized by the irreversible impact of human activity on Earth. This scientific hypothesis is substantiated in large part by the environmental crisis striking the contemporary world. The many ways our environment is declining force us to question the current chances for the planet, and thus humanity, to survive. In the last decades, many works within northern occidental culture have been reflecting this troubling reality through fictitious scenarios. This network of numerous and diverse representations participate in building a social “imaginary” (the French concept of “imaginaire”) of the environmental crisis.This study focuses on such representation in literature by comparing eight novels from France, Canada and the United States, deeming them as « fictions of the Anthropocene ». It investigates what, in fact, contemporary fictions contribute to the social imaginary of the environmental crisis. The works this study concentrates on use common themes such as pollution or global warming, but also elaborate fictitious scenarios which imagine possible futures for an endangered world. Such works depict how the environmental crisis is related to the way we, as humans, dwell in the world. Within this context, it becomes convincingly apparent that the current environmental crisis is profoundly affecting humans individually and collectively. The elaborate writing and the corresponding imaginary of these works confirm the relevance of literary narratives when considering the question of human survival in the Anthropocene

Cette thèse a pour objet d’interroger la singularité historique du concept d’Anthropocène dans le domaine des sciences de la Terre afin de répondre au problème de savoir à quel titre il peut être considéré comme un événement réflexif de la modernité. Pour ce faire, nous entreprenons une archéologie de ce concept selon trois temporalités. La première, s’étalant du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle, interroge le statut des énoncés savants caractérisant l’influence globale de l’agir humain. Il apparaît que l’activité géologique de l’humanité était déjà au cœur des sciences modernes. La temporalité intermédiaire de la deuxième partie montre comment le discours géologique est profondément renouvelé après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La Terre est alors réinventée comme un environnement total au sein d’un dispositif de savoir et de pouvoir. Enfin, la troisième partie, en temporalité courte, analyse le processus de fabrication du concept d’Anthropocène, principalement dans les sciences du système Terre et dans la géologie. Résultant d’associations entre des acteurs aux projets hétérogènes, ce processus oscille entre une dynamique d’extension et une dynamique de spéciation du concept dans les normes de la géologie, qui sont bousculées par l’actualité de l’Anthropocène. Au bilan, il ressort que ce concept s’inscrit dans le long héritage du dire géologique de la modernité, mais le renouvelle profondément. L’actualité géologique définie comme une pathologie dessine en creux une norme de santé de la Terre que la politique doit s’approprier
This thesis aims to question the historical singularity of the Anthropocene concept in the field of Earth sciences, in order to determine whether it can be considered as a reflexive event of Modernity. In order to do so, we undertake an archaeology of this concept according to three temporalities. The first one, from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, questions the status of statements characterizing the global influence of human action. The geological activity of humanity appears to have always been at the heart of modern science. The intermediate temporality of the second part shows how the geological discourse is deeply renewed after the Second World War. The Earth is then reinvented as a total environment within an apparatus of knowledge and power. Finally, the third part, corresponding to the short temporality, analyzes the process of fabrication of the Anthropocene concept, mainly in the Earth system sciences and in geology. Resulting from associations between actors with heterogeneous projects, this process oscillates between a dynamic of extension and a dynamic of speciation of the concept in the norms of geology, which are shaken by the actuality of the Anthropocene. In the end, it appears that this concept is part of the long heritage of the geological statements of modernity, but renews it profoundly. In the process of defining the geological actuality as a pathology, a norm of healthy Earth is drawn that politics must cease and appropriate

L’Anthropocène, qui signifie la modification de nature anthropique des conditions d’habitabilité de la Terre de façon durable, met en exergue combien la modernité est marquée par une hégémonie économique, au détriment du politique. Les conceptions de l’action politique en Anthropocène sont en tension entre un désir d’accomplissement du projet prométhéen de la modernité et une approche postprométhéenne ; l’Anthropocène confronte l’humanité à une krisis anthropologique à traverser. Ce travail explore l’idée d’une consolidation du politique nécessitant une mutation anthropologique à partir d’un « entre nous postprométhéen », au fondement de la capacité à agir ensemble. La pensée politique de la condition humaine développée par Hannah Arendt est investie ici comme une ressource pour penser l’humanité à partir de la notion d’aventure humaine constituée de trois dimensions : l’hybris, le monde et la coexistence renvoyant respectivement à la logique de profit de l’homo oeconomicus, à la logique de responsabilité de l’homo collectivus et à la logique de l’hospitalité de l’homo religatus. Le geste intellectuel et politique esquissé dans ce travail s’inscrit dans le prolongement de la théorie critique : dans un même mouvement il est proposé une critique de ce qui pose problème dans notre rapport au monde et une proposition de dépassement ayant pour finalité une transformation sociale. Le geste proposé est celui d’un soulèvement et d’une consolidation anthropologique du politique à partir de la vitalisation permise par le partage d’une convivialité entre humains et avec le non humain. L’identification du convivialisme comme paradigme éducatif pour traverser l’Anthropocène est la matérialisation d’une nécessaire raison d’espérer en dépit de cet héritage de l’Anthropocène. La théorie critique proposée tente d’articuler les fonctions de résistance, de critique et d’utopie. Il importe de tenir dans l’opposition (résistance) à partir de ce qui est identifié comme problématique (critique) pour que l’avenir espéré puisse advenir (utopie). Cette théorie critique pour l’Anthropocène mobilise, en plus de la pensée arendtienne, les pensées politiques de plusieurs auteurs contemporains dont notamment Maurice Bellet, Hartmut Rosa, Andreas Weber, Dominique Bourg, Christian Arnsperger, les auteurs d’un ensemble de manifestes politiques paru ces dernières années, ainsi que les convivialistes autour d’Alain Caillé, Corine Pelluchon ou François Flahault
The Anthropocene, which means the anthropogenic modification of the Earth’s habitability conditions in a lasting way, highlights the extent to which modernity is marked by economic hegemony, to the detriment of politics. The conceptions of political action in Anthropocene are in tension between a desire to accomplish the Promethean project of modernity and a post-promethean approach. The Anthropocene confronts humanity with an anthropological krisis to cross. This work explores the idea of an anthropological mutation of political consolidation from a “post-promethean between us”, at the foundation of the capacity to act together. The political thinking of the human condition developed by Hannah Arendt is invested here as a resource for thinking about humanity based on the notion of human adventure made up of three dimensions: the hybris, the world and coexistence referring respectively to the logic of profit of the homo oeconomicus, the logic of responsibility of the homo collectivus and the logic of the hospitality of the homo religatus.The intellectual and political gesture outlined in this work is an extension of the critical theory: in the same movement a critique of what poses a problem in our relationship to the world and a proposal for surpassing ourselves with the aim of social transformation are proposed. The proposed gesture is that of an uprising and an anthropological consolidation of politics based on the vitality made possible by the sharing of a conviviality between humans and with the non-human. The identification of conviviality as an educational paradigm to cross the Anthropocene is the materialization of a necessary reason for hope despite this inheritance of the Anthropocene. The critical theory proposed attempts to articulate the functions of resistance, criticism and utopia. It is important to remain in opposition (resistance) based on what is identified as problematic (critical) so that the hoped-for future can come (utopia). This critical theory for the Anthropocene mobilizes, in addition to the Arendtian thinking, the political thinking of several contemporary authors including Maurice Bellet, Hartmut Rosa, Andreas Weber, Dominique Bourg, Christian Arnsperger, the authors of a set of political manifestos published in recent years, as well as the convivialists around Alain Caillé, Corine Pelluchon or François Flahault

English
Ph.D.
This dissertation studies literary modernism’s philosophies of nature. It examines how historical attitudes about natural environments and climates are codified in literary texts, what values attach to them, and how relationships between humanity and nature are figured in modernist fiction. Attending less to nature itself than to concepts, ideologies, and aesthetic theories about nature, it argues that British modernism and ecology articulate shared concerns with the vitality of the earth, the shaping force of climate, and the need for new ways of understanding the natural world. Many of British modernism’s most familiar texts, by E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, reveal a sustained preoccupation with significant concepts in environmental and intellectual history, including competition between vitalist, holist, and mechanistic philosophies and science, global industrialization by the British Empire, and the emergence of ecology as a revolutionary means of ordering the physical world. “Modernism, Ecology, and the Anthropocene” uncovers these preoccupations to illustrate how consistently literary works leverage environmental ideologies and how pervasively literature shapes cultural and even scientific attitudes toward the natural world. Through the geological concept of the Anthropocene, it brings literary history into interdisciplinary conversations that have recently emerged from the Earth sciences and are now increasingly common in the humanities, social sciences, and in wider public debates about climate change. The dissertation’s first chapter, “Connecting Earth to Empire: E. M. Forster’s Changing Climate,” argues that E.M. Forster’s fiction apprehends the global implications of local climate change at a crucial time in environmental and literary history. By relating Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India to his 1909 story, “The Machine Stops,” it attends to the speculative aspects of Forster’s work and presents Forster as a keen observer who foresaw not only the passing of rural England and the arrival of a new urban way of life, but environmental change on a global scale. Its second chapter, “The Call of Life: James Joyce’s Vitalist Aesthetics,” explores the connotations “life” gathers in Joyce’s early fiction and proposes a new reading of his aesthetics that emphasizes its ecological implications by pairing Joyce with his contemporary “modern” vitalism and current new materialisms. The third chapter, “Make it Whole: The Ecosystems of Virginia Woolf and A.G. Tansley,” revises critical conceptions of Woolf as an ecological writer and environmental histories of early ecology by showing how Woolf’s philosophy of nature and Tansley’s ecosystem concept run parallel and represent a shared intellectual project: advocating theories of form and of perception that navigate the tension between holist and mechanistic conceptions of nature and mind. A final chapter, “Landlord of the Planet: H. G. Wells, Human Extinction, and Anthropocene Narratives,” establishes Wells as an early environmental humanist whose ecological outlook evolved with his perception of the rapidly increasing pace of climate change and its threat to the human species. By digging into a rarely-read scientific textbook he co-authored, The Science of Life, this chapter analyzes how the natural world is managed in three Wellsian utopias and traces the development of his writing in concert with ecology.
Temple University--Theses

Dance
Ph.D.
This dissertation is an ecological philosophy rooted in dance as a somatic mode of knowing and as a way of perceiving the world through and as movement. It is phenomenological, drawing meaning from a dedicated practice of improvisational dance and from extensive dialogue with dance and somatics artist/philosopher Sondra Horton Fraleigh. This emergent knowledge is integrated into discourses and practices addressing the relationship of the human and more than human world in the context of a deepening environmental crisis in the 21st century. Employing both somatic and conceptual ways of knowing, I investigate dance as a tool for restoring a sense of ecological kinship with nonhuman co-habitants of planet Earth. The pretext for the dissertation is the emerging concept of the Anthropocene, a term introduced by Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s which defines human activity as the dominant geophysical force affecting the movements of the Earth system, including weather patterns and chemistries of soil, air and water. This concept, while subject to debate both in and out of the sciences, highlights the entanglement of humans and Earth and calls into question anthropocentric notions placing humans at the center of the universe of significance and meaning. In light of growing challenges associated with the Anthropocene, including climate change and mass extinction, the dissertation makes a case for greater inclusion of ecological and environmental contexts in dance studies scholarship as an epistemological move towards increasing reciprocity with Earth. I argue that environmental crisis, while daunting, presents an opportunity for radical creativity in re-thinking the interconnected movements of human bodies and planet Earth. In summer 2015, I conducted a one-month, fieldwork-based interview with Fraleigh, which included verbal dialog, dancing, and exploration of the landscape of southern Utah, where she lives following retirement from university teaching. Fraleigh, whom I had known personally and professionally for twelve years since studying with her as an MFA student in the early 2000s, is a dance artist, philosopher and somatic educator widely known within and outside the academic dance community for her writing and teaching in phenomenology, dance aesthetics, somatics, and butoh. Her decades of inquiry into the nature and meaning of dance and human embodiment have consistently included questions about the relationship of humans and nature, and she has argued that humans are ecological as well as cultural beings. Through collaborative somatic and intellectual processes, we extended questions we shared about the relationship of humans with Earth through its contextualization within the emerging paradigm of the geologic Age of Humans. The dissertation is organized into two parts. Part One describes the onto-epistemological context for the fieldwork I conducted in Utah and includes background literature on the subjects of body, perception, matter and environmental ethics, followed by an explanation of the research methodologies I employed. Part Two is a phenomenological account of the fieldwork, which spirals between thick description of specific experiences and theoretical reflections on emergent meanings. Through this format, I integrate somatic and conceptual ways of knowing and illuminate dance as a mode of meaning making and response to geologic transformations taking place on Earth. By engaging dance as a tool for thinking about and with the Anthropocene, I aim to promote more scholarly inquiry into ways that dance can and does transform, heal, revitalize and aestheticize human-Earth relations in the context of a planet in crisis.
Temple University--Theses

This thesis utilizes concepts of the ecocritical theory of deep ecology to elucidate non-anthropocentricism and nature’s agency as depicted by three apocalyptic eco-narratives written in the long nineteenth century: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). I offer readings of these texts as “Anthropocenic” science fiction novels, building upon Paul J. Crutzen’s work on the Anthropocene, our current geological epoch. Utilizing literary, historic, and scientific rationale, I make an argument for the reframing of literary periods according to geological transformations due to human interaction with the environment and collectively term apocalyptic eco-narratives written at the time of the Industrial Revolution through today as “Anthropocenic.” In my analysis, I demonstrate how Shelley’s, Jefferies’, and Shiel’s science fiction works exaggerate environmental concerns contemporary to their respective historical moments, and I offer deep ecological interpretations of their perceptions of industrialism and pollution, specifically in and around London. I also expound upon the way in which all three novels depict nature as an active, nonhuman character with agency and intention, either inducing an ecological apocalypse to protect itself or, as in Shiel’s novel, to punish humanity for ecological crimes. My “deepist” approach attempts non-anthropocentricism whenever possible and allows a progressive, nontraditional critique of these texts primarily from nature’s perspective—not humanity’s. Particularly, this thesis is interested in how nature retakes and re-greens spaces that are polluted by human activity or abused in the interest of human consumption. Demonstrating the way in which perceptions of nature’s agency evolved through the long nineteenth century and providing historical context for Great Britain’s ecological condition, I position that these three Anthropocenic texts ultimately blame London’s industrialism for ecological devastation in and around the city and conflate natural phenomena, like volcanoes, with industrialist pollution in fictional explorations of nature’s agency and potential ability to retaliate against humanity for irresponsible environmental practices. In the last chapter, I analyze the way in which Biblical allusion is used in The Purple Cloud to both sensationalize and rationalize punishment for anthropogenic climate change as an ecological sin according to the Book of Genesis.

Starting from the notion of hyperbole as rhetoric figure and philosophical concept, my dissertation places Pynchon's and Bolaño's maximalist novels in a wider context shaped by the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new historical and geological epoch, by the return of realism in the humanities, by the renewed philosophical interest for ontological and metaphysical questions, by the possibility of a posthumanist phenomenology and by literature's 'anxiety of obsolescence' in a post-literate age. In this context, I examine a variety of literary questions (such as abundance as a modality of uncertainty, the dramaturgy of light and darkness, metaphors, ekphrasis etc.) to reveal the novels' hyperbolic structures that can nevertheless be inscribed within a realist framework. In Pynchon's and Bolaño's novels, hyperbolic doubts and linguisticuncertainty punctuate the narrative universes. If these doubts and uncertainties are over and over again vanquished by the adventurous labor of figuration, they are never fully abolished, but form the dark core of literary discourse and, after all, any linguistic act
En partant de la notion de l'hyperbole comme figure rhétorique et concept philosophique, ma thèse de doctorat analyse les deux romans maximalistes de Pynchon et Bolaño dans un contexte marqué par l'émergence de l'Anthropocène comme nouvelle époque historique et géologique, par le retour du réalisme dans les sciences humaines, par le nouvel intérêt pourl'ontologie et la métaphysique en philosophie, par le détournement de certains projets phénoménologiques de l'humanisme, et par la possibilité d'anachronisme qui pèse aujourd'hui sur le genre littéraire. Dans ce contexte, j'examine les différentes questions de l'analyse littéraire (la copia, la dramaturgie du clair-obscur, la métaphore, l'ekphrasisetc.) pour révéler les structures poétiques hyperboliques qui sont quand même inscrites dans un cadre réaliste. Ces romans mettent en scène la permanence du doute hyperbolique dans l'univers narrative et au sein même du langage, mais ils effectuent en même temps le dépassement aventureux et laborieux de ce doute sans intention de nier les incertitudesfondamentales sur lesquelles sont fondés tout discours littéraire et, à la fin, toute acte linguistique

This essay investigates the ecological values present in antagonists and protagonists in the narrative revolving the Avengers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The analysis concludes that biocentric ideals primarily are embodied by the main antagonist of the film series, whereas the protagonists mainly represent anthropocentric perspectives. Since there is a continuum between these two ideals some variations were found within the characters themselves, but philosophical conflicts related to the environment were also found within the group of the Avengers. Excerpts from the films of the study can thus be used to discuss and highlight complex ecological issues within the EFL-classroom.

The dissertation re-examines the philosophy of Georges Bataille within the context of post-Kantian aesthetics and argues for a re-evaluation of Bataille’s notion of expenditure [depenser] within this context. The dissertation argues further that the artistic practice of Robert Smithson is an exemplary case of an ‘aesthetics of expenditure.’ It is our contention that Bataille’s cosmic-energetic philosophy finds a complementary material expression in Smithson’s abstract geology and its confrontation with post-Kantian aesthetics. We will argue that this occurs through Smithson’s varying strategies, which are grouped conceptually according to the broader logic of their expression:seriality, sedimentality, monumentality, and meandering. While Smithson’s own references to Bataille in the early 1970s are discussed in detail, it is not our position that Smithson was enacting Bataille’s philosophy ‘aesthetically’; rather, by reading Bataille’s evaluation of Kant’s aesthetics and teleology in relation to Smithson’s artistic practice, we emphasize instead that the politics of disgust shared by both figures advance a radical decentring and repositioning of the human in relation to planetary and geological forces. If, as geologists now agree, our present age is that of the Anthropocene1, our argument is that Bataille and Smithson anticipate this precarious condition analytically, and, perhaps more importantly, that their analysis suggests further important diagnostic considerations at the level of social organization and political composition that might help defer, if not entirely prevent, the catastrophic end of this all-too-human period.

The aim of the study was to develop a critical posthumanist and democratic theory that may be applied in the teaching and learning of Life Sciences in South Africa in order to achieve an expanded form of democracy that would not discriminate between human and nonhuman. Though both critical posthumanist and democratic theories have been used in pedagogical studies separately, this study focused on the development of a merged and broader theory that has elements of both of the theories. The term nonhuman, as used here, does not specifically refer to non-person individuals only. Rather, it also refers to people who are regarded by the dominant humans as nonhumans – inferiors and subalterns. The latter group of people include the poor, women, children, people of colour and the disabled. Owing to this binarisation characteristic of the Life Sciences as a subject – which it adopts from the nature of science, its curriculum, and pedagogical approaches – the impression is given that as the master of the universe, the human has unlimited power over all other entities. These other nonhuman entities are then regarded as resources for the use of humans. Yet, it is this attitude which has caused humans to abuse nonhumans to the extent that the earth is facing the catastrophe of the Anthropocene. The adoption of a critical education approach characterised by the development of a critical posthumanist and democratic theory that may be applied in the teaching and learning of Life Sciences is essential in dealing with the issue of the Anthropocene that is threatening the earth currently. This study thus seeks to adopt a critical education approach through the introduction of democracy into the teaching and learning of Life Sciences, specifically so that humans would get to a position where they would consider nonhumans as entities with which they co-exist, and entities with equal agency within the environment. The recognition of the need for democracy would allow the humans to treat the nonhumans (such as the environment and ‘subalterns’) with respect, as their compatriots; and by doing that, the harrowing issues leading to the catastrophe of the Anthropocene could be either avoided or averted.
Educational Foundations

Collaborating in the Electric Age: [onto]Riffological Experiments in Posthumanizing Education and Theorizing a Machinic Arts-Based Research is a study about locating opportunities and entry points for introducing consideration of the nonhuman and posthuman to pedagogical perspectives that are traditionally concerned with human beings and epistemological subjects. The research, herein, engages doings in collaborative effort, during conditions of unprecedented interconnectedness facilitated by the electric age. Steeped in a environment thus created by technologies’ immense ubiquity and influence, this collaboration endeavours to recognize their full research participation, alongside that of humans. This research presents collaboratively conducted, published inquiries that have been coauthored by myself and fellow doctoral candidate Richard Wainwright. Each facilitates, then attempts to articulate ways to decentre the human in educational contexts, beginning with our own human perspectives. As exercises in broadening our considerations of the life forms, matter, and nonhuman entities that surround humanity, this research prompts us to recognize much more than what humanity typically acknowledges as existing, given the anthropocentric frameworks it has constructed. We reorientate the nature of these relationships—posthumanizing them—and in doing so, disrupt our own thinking to work something different than our circumstances have hitherto informed us to consider. We have co-developed a study and conducted research in collaboration with human and nonhuman research participants.Five nationally and internationally published co-authored journal articles, a book chapter, and five intermezzos (short “observational” pieces) comprise this study that explores collaboration and recombinatoriality during “the electric age” (McLuhan, 1969, 10:05). Recognizing humanity’s increasingly inextricable relationships with technologies, this collaboratively conducted study draws into creative assemblage Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts; new materialism as cultural theory; the prescient observations and predictions of Marshall McLuhan and a media studies curriculum he co-developed over forty years ago; arts-based research; museum exhibitions; features of music production such as sampling, mashup, remix, and turntabling; among many other notes and tones. A conceptually developed riff mobilizes our inquiries as “plug in and play,” while its academic study is theorized as [onto]Riffology. Ontological shifts beget a machinic arts-based research (MABR) that develops a posthuman critical pedagogy inspired by Negri and Guattari (2010). Collaborating in the Electric Age: [onto]Riffological Experiments in Posthumanizing Education and Theorizing a Machinic Arts-Based Research celebrates collaborativity, discovery, and learning during the electric age.
Graduate
2022-01-07