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Technical Development and Education

As digitisation and computers in general are advancing rapidly, many engineers and scientists work on the possibilities and challenges developing artificial intelligence might pose. AI as a topic is also being researched by a handful of members of our division.

As such, researcher Lina Rahm has published a new article with the title “Education, automation and AI: a genealogy of alternative future” in the journal Learning, Media and Technology. She discusses the co-development of education technologies with both new trends in digital advancements and views on these issues from the past. The way we do education as humanities scholars has already changed profoundly during the ongoing pandemic. Furthermore, change is an ongoing thing and thus Lina’s research is necessary more than ever.

If you are interested in the article you can find it here.

Abstract:

The relationship between technical development and education is a reciprocal one, where education always stands in relation to those skills, competencies, and techniques that are anticipated as necessary in a technological future. At the same time, skills and competencies are also necessary to drive innovation and technical development for the progressive creation of desirable futures. Jumping back to the 1950s, this article illustrates how automation and AI have been anticipated as both problems and solutions in society, and how education has been used to solve these problems or realize these solutions. That is, computerization debates have concentrated on both the growing opportunities and the increasing risks, but almost always also on the need for corresponding education. The article uses a genealogical approach to show how, from the 1950s and up until today, education has been mobilized as an important tool for governance in computer policies.

 

 

Marco Armiero and Cecilia Åsberg Respond to the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity

Both EHL director Marco Armiero and Division guest professor Cecilia Åsberg was published in the 2020 summer issue of Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. Ecocene is a digital, open-access, peer-reviewed, international, and transdisciplinary journal of the Environmental Humanities.The June issue of the journal wrapped sixteen articles from different authors under the title Environmental Humanists Respond to the World. Read the abstracts and find links to the open access articles below.

Abstracts

Beyond Nonpartisan Discourses: Radical Knowledge for Extreme Times
by Marco Armiero

The majority of scientists agree on climate change and on the most daunting environmental problems humans are facing today. Moved by a commendable desire to contribute to the solution of these problems, several scientists have decided to speak up, telling the scientific truth about climate change to decision-makers and the public. Although appreciating the commitment to intervene in the public arena, I discuss some limits of these interventions. I argue that stating the reality of climate change does not prescribe any specific solution and sometimes it seems faint in distributing responsibilities. I ask whether unveiling/knowing the truth can be enough to foster radical transformations. Can knowledge move people towards transformative actions if power relationships do not change?Various environmental justice controversies prove that even when science is certain—and this is rarely the case in that kind of controversies—knowing might be not enough in the face of power structures preventing free choices and radical changes. In the end of my article, I state that it is fair to recognize that scientists have done their parts, and it is now up to social movements to foster the radical changes in power relationships that are needed for transforming societies.

Keywords: Politicization, scientific consensus, radical transformations, truth, environmental justice

Visit the Environment & Society Portal to download and read to full article: Beyond Nonpartisan Discourses: Radical Knowledge for Extreme Times” | Environment & Society Portal


A Sea Change in the Environmental Humanities
by Cecilia Åsberg

As we are living through a transformative response to a viral pandemic, this think piece suggests a reimagining of the environmental humanities in the open-ended inventories of feminist posthumanities and the low trophic registers of the oceanic. Sea farming of low trophic species such as seaweeds and bivalves is still underexplored option for the mitigation of climate change and diminishing species diversity in the warming oceans of the world. The affordances of low trophic mariculture for coastal life and for contributing to society’s transition into climate aware practices of eating, socializing and thinking is here considered, and showcased as an example of the practical uses of feminist environmental posthumanities.

Keywords: feminist environmental humanities, feminist posthumanities, oceanic studies, low trophic theory

Visit the Environment & Society Portal to download and read to full article: “A Sea Change in the Environmental Humanities” | Environment & Society Portal


Full list to the open access articles in the Ecocene June issue
Ecocene Volume 1/ Issue 1/June 2020 

 

Visiting the Cosmos: Science Fiction in the Gallery

by Caroline Elgh Klingborg, Curator, Bonniers Konsthall

Last fall, I brought a group of researchers and guests from KTH’s Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment to the exhibit I curated for Bonniers Konsthall, entitled Cosmological Arrows: Journeys through Inner and Outer Space.* Their curiosity in the powers of science fiction and speculative fiction by way of research and teaching (for instance, the course Science Goes Fiction) sparked engagement and conversation, for which I’ve been asked to contribute my thoughts behind the exhibit. As I see it, we are living in a world where we are facing countless ecological, technical, and political challenges. The state of the world is an apparent and important part of the public debate where researchers, activists and other engaged people want to create visibility and change. At the same time, there also seem to be a growing sense of powerlessness, especially among young people, that it might be too late to save our planet. Since we are facing all these challenges together as humans and more-than-humans living on this damaged planet, we need new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge and new forms of collaborations. And here we can turn to the arts.

During recent years, we have seen a growing number of exhibitions and art projects—internationally and in Sweden—that evolve around the state of the world and our present future. Nearby subject areas such as science fiction, space, co-habitation and the more-than-human have interested an increasing number of artists in recent years. Themes like these have been featured in international exhibitions such as Gravity: Imagining the Universe after Einstein at MAXXI in Rome, Is This Tomorrow? at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Tomorrow is the Question at ARoS in Århus, and—not least—May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff for the latest Venice Biennale. In Sweden, I need to point at exhibitions such as The non-human Animal at Uppsala Art Museum, Sensing Nature from Within at Moderna Museet in Malmö and Animalesque and Art Across Species and Beings at Bildmuseet in Umeå. It is distinctly clear that visual artists, curators and art institutions feel the need to engage with the rapid technological, ecological and political changes the world is going through—and to rethink the definitions of nature, agency, materiality and what it means to be human.

Caroline Elgh Klingborg, curator, of Cosmological Arrows. Photo by Cecilia Åsberg.

Climate researchers like Keri Facer has spoken about the arts as something we will need more of in the present future and that art can teach us about experimental thinking and how to live with some uncertainty. So, from various disciplines, there seem to be an openness and wish for interdisciplinary collaborations to bring forward new perspectives on human and more-than-human forms of co-habitation. Some of these perspectives were brought forward in the exhibition. The exhibition was shown during autumn 2019 and assembled a group of artists—Allora & Calzadilla, Lee Bul, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Debora Elgeholm, Johannes Heldén, Anna Hoetjes, Jone Kvie, Lawrence Lek, Caroline Mesquita, Brittany Nelson, Lea Porsager, Larissa Sansour, Arseny Zhilyaev and Asya Volodina—who are all interested in science fiction and humanity’s conception of the cosmos. In keeping with our own time, my intention for this exhibition was to highlight how visual artists are using space and the genre of science fiction as an imaginary laboratory that forms the basis for discussions of today’s ethical, moral, existential and political dilemmas.

Sofia Jonsson poses with Lee Bul’s, Civitas Solis II, 2014. Photo by Cecilia Åsberg.

Cosmological Arrows showed the connections between contemporary art and science fiction, and how this rather new relationship can contribute to new ways of thinking, being and acting in the world. In the preface to her science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) writes about how she uses science fiction to do leaps of imagination. Le Guin does not believe that her work as an author contributes any kind of evidence-based research into how the future will look (because no divine or visionary prophesies come from science fiction) but instead describes reality and the time in which the book is being written.

This reading was also appropriate for the artworks presented in Cosmological Arrows. The exhibition clearly showed that science fiction does not constitute an escape into another world. Rather the exhibition highlighted and illustrated an intricate interplay between reality and fiction in which science fiction became a tool for testing and conceiving of various historical, contemporary or future scenarios. Even if the works presented were (rather dystopian) portraits of our time—and dealt with our reality on the only planet that is habitable (as far as we know today)—the conceptual worlds that the artists can create with the help of science fiction could perhaps offer us a certain understanding of or preparation for what might await us in the future.

Visiting the exhibit, from left to right: Caroline Elgh Klingborg, Jesse Peterson, Myra Hird, Sabine Höhler, Sofia Jonsson, Silvia Thomackenstein, and Janne Holmstedt. Photo by Cecilia Åsberg.

I am sure we will see more of these perspectives and initiatives within the arts during upcoming years. The genre of science fiction has gained new relevance today and its themes and images bring together artists, film makers, writers and academics—bridging the gap between art, popular culture, activism and academia.

*The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with the same name. The book contains texts by Caroline Elgh Klingborg, Jerry Määttä, Mahan Moalemi, and Cecilia Åsberg, as well as short stories by Aleksandr Bogdanov, Ted Chiang, Karin Tidbeck and Alice B. Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr. and artworks by Agnieszka Brzezanska, Allora & Calzadilla, Anna Hoetjes, Arseny Zhilyaev & Asya Volodina, Brittany Nelson, Caroline Mesquita, Debora Elgeholm, Johannes Heldén, Jone Kvie, Larissa Sansour, Lawrence Lek, Lea Porsager, and Lee Bul.

Author Bio: Caroline Elgh Klingborg is a curator of contemporary art. Her work explores interdisciplinary processes and collaborations across different fields of research. In exhibitions and publications, she has brought forward the meeting between visual arts and fields such as speculative fiction, environment, new materialisms and truth. As a curator at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm she has recently curated the group exhibition Cosmological Arrows. Journeys Through Inner and Outer Space and Dora Garcia´s solo exhibition I Always Tell the Truth. Caroline Elgh Klingborg collaborates with The Posthumanities Hub and is also a guest lecturer at Stockholm University´s Curating Program.

Why we need feminist posthumanities for a more-than-human world

by: Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska

Today, the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. That much is clear in this new planetary era of uncertainty some call the Anthropocene. This new geological period, the environmental Age of Man, is often defined by unparalleled human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems, climate, and biological systems. For instance, half of the wildlife on Earth has been lost in the past forty years, but we have also soon perhaps made more lab-created species, synthetic biologies or artificial intelligences than we asked for. It seems, philosophically, that in the age of the Anthropocene, humans have become a ‘force of nature’, making nature in its classical sense over. Yet, then so is also the notion of the human reaching its limits. Actually, both in terms of planetary sustainability and in terms of how we have gotten used to thinking the human as some kind of Universal Man, a bounded individual, safely zipped up in a white skin of his own, guided by only rational thought (rather than desires) and, so to speak, living on top of things—as the world (nature/the planet) seems to be his oyster.

Emerging now in Anthropocene discourse and in diverse planetary struggles are the many embodied subjects we thought were less-than-human, nonhuman, or ahuman. They range from subalterns living (and dying) on wastelands of richer people’s making, insects subject to mass extinction rates, whole new media ecologies, to the crip and the queer in all of us discovered by biologists, or to, for instance, CRISPR Cas9 technologies, or everyday algorithms that reproduce and multiply our cultural biases on a global scale. They all call for attention. The “death of nature” (a notion from the trail-blazing feminist environmental historian Carolyn Merchant) mirrors the “death of Man” (a poststructuralist theory notion) in the Anthropocene, in eerie and unsettling ways. It also evokes curiosity over the postnatural and the posthuman forms of life now available to us, in these days of need to rethink our categories and our options for the present and the future as the past comes back to haunt us. In such a dire situation, what are now the available arts “of living on a damaged planet” for us? (See Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt 2017).

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? In fact, especially as it seems those old categories or thinking habits have not done us justice or any good in the past.

The troublesome “universalisation of humanity” into the figure of Universal Man, denying sexual differences and social inequities following along the lines of race, gender, bodily ability, age and other historical norms have long been a pinnacle of feminist critique. Longstanding feminist theory-practices of decolonizing the domains of the Universal Man-idea thus mark a particularly critical and creative source for the planetary forms of posthumanities we claim is needed now. Feminist analytics deal with changes, with what constitutive relations make a specific society or situated formation possible. It basically ask who gets to suffer, prosper or die, who gets to live and play, and to the benefit of whom (cui bono)? Furthermore, recent feminist theory is drawing attention not only to creativity and potentiality of bodies, but also to that which delimits or wounds conditions of life on earth at large—especially within hybrid fields such as feminist environmental humanities. And importantly, it asks how we may learn to live with those wounds and limitations with some grace together. Mutualism and symbiont ethics, biophilosophy and eco-humanities, companion species or cyborg connections for earthly survival (following Donna J. Haraway’s rich oeuvre) are keywords for such feminist posthumanities.

Postdisciplinary practices and situated knowledges (Haraway again!) are of course especially salient in this regard: a brute necessity. The planet knows no disciplinary borders, it does not separate between nature and culture. Our planetary issues can not be solved by demarcations where sciences do nature and humanities do culture. In truth, our Anthropocene predicament belies the whole classical distinction between nature and culture! The needed efficacy of such postdisciplinary work is evidenced in many new, old and déja vu fields like feminist science studies and networked new materialisms, in bio-art and eco-art, in somatechnics, new media studies, post-continental philosophy, in anthropocene studies or transcorporeal theory, in multispecies- and medical humanities, in transgender studies, xenofeminism, cyborg- or techno-humanities, ecological or environmental humanities, queer death studies, critical veganism, and a mounting range of posthumanisms, inhumanisms and ahumanisms. Yes, critical and creative scholars in and around the humanities have not been lazy in the face of the many issues that face us today. Feminist posthumanities cover or converse with such postdisciplinary practices. It labels a wide-spread, multi-sited, evolving and growing effort to rework the role of the humanities and their relation to science, technology, art and contemporary society on the basis that our idea of the human is fundamentally reaching its limits, and changing. Feminist posthumanities thus responds to the need for more-than-human humanities.

Accordingly, the feminist posthumanities of the postconventional research group The Posthumanities Hub at the Division for History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm (and Linköping University), focuses on critique and creativity of such planetary arts, on issues of technological and environmental embodiment, on relational ecologies of death and environmental health, on infrastructures of waste and deep time ethics of sustainability, on contemporary technocultures, science communication and popular media cultures but, especially, also on multispecies relations as crucial points of empirical interventions, methodological inventions and theoretical innovations.

The assumption behind this bold mission is that feminist and other kindred forms of the posthumanities are in fact already creating institutional changes, providing novel insights for researchers and civic society, and new sets of post- or trans-disciplinary practices. Take the environmental humanities as a case in point! The research we do has already changed narratives about, for instance, the role of gender and climate change, the importance of thinking with the nonhumans of the planet, and the extent of toxic embodiment in daily life, along with the impact of science, communication as well as digital mediation on our social practices and ideas of ourselves (and others) in society. Luckily, we have been able to convince research funding bodies in Sweden, the North, Europe and Canada, in spite of (or thanks to?) our postdisciplinarity and our use of the f-word. Moreover, new research in our international networks and in our own ranks explores the global infrastructures of technological surveillance and security issues of today; the multiplex processes of translation characteristic of new media; and, last but not least, process ontologies (“world-makings”) at work in both the life sciences, in the creative arts, and in philosophies of subjectivity.

At large, the feminist posthumanities of The Posthumanities Hub aims to map out and chart, but also provide deep insight into, pursue and develop a partly novel and inventive agenda, which stems from, but is not limited to, either humanism or anthropocentrism, feminism or environmentalism. We represent an intervention in contemporary research practices and habits of thought. For our research and for our problems, we need at least a more-than-human approach. At present, there are a plethora of new research initiatives and individual scholars testifying to effervescent activities of a new field coming of age. Just check out the work on biophilosophy and eco-/bioart by Marietta Radomska, or the community building soil art by Janna Holmstedt, or the plant theory put in practice by Lauren LaFauci, the science- and art infused environmental humanities of Vera Weetzel, the Baltic Sea research of Jesse Peterson, the deep time insights and more-than-human sustainability ethics developed by Christina Fredengren and Cecilia Åsberg, or the emerging insights from all the students of the KTH module Gender & Technology (AK2202)! This embarrassment of riches that we are developing from KTH is evidenced all over the academic landscape with new networks and research groups, and art-science communities popping up like mushrooms in the soil on a rainy autumn. The Posthumanities Hub as a postconventional research group anno 2008, one of the first of its kind in the world, supports the establishment of new scholar-activists, new research environments, and explores novel collaborative practices and bold postdisciplinary methodologies, sustainably. For the long run. We believe that it is only through strategic and curious alliances—across differences—that we can survive, in academic settings as on the planet.

Philosophically, the question of the posthuman was pioneered by feminist scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, Donna J. Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. The postnatural and posthuman ideas we use and develop today follow on the realisation that we were never human to begin with in the double sense of a) not part of the Universal Man club of society, and b) not biologically even purely human but rather a multi-species assemblage in ecological relationships with other companion species, like bacteria or other organisms that moderate our embodied and environed existence. These ideas derive from both advanced cultural critique and science. Posthuman theory, explored in wildly diverse empirical studies and projects, as we deploy it within our research, is not an issue of technologically enhancing the human for the future but of realising how vulnerable we are as socio-biological assemblages on an all too humanised planet. Technofixes, history tells us, have a tendency of solving some problems and creating new, bigger ones in turn. Clearly, we take our clues and insights from, and work in close collaborations with, scientists, engineers, artists and social communicators, and we contribute to research fields like environmental humanities, medical humanities, continental philosophy, intersectional gender studies, queer theory, feminist cultural studies, science and technology studies (STS), art and design practices, societal activism and insights for the decolonial option, software studies, cognitive and educational sciences, animal behavior science and epigenetics research as well as critical animal studies. To this effect, we emphasise the multi-species ecology and (somewhat unacademic) kindness of humankind (following on recent work by Timothy Morton). A longstanding concern for us have been how to analytically bridge the arts and sciences, and how to help engineering and natural science and get humanities’ involvement with the aforementioned and other life-sciences recognised. We are currently witnessing a genuine proliferation of new feminist or pro-feminist work on the posthumanities, in art and research in Sweden and all over the world. Perhaps because of this wealth of options (even “embarrassment of riches” as Braidotti would say), there is, however, no consensus either in terms of terminology or key-concepts in the field of posthumanities. That is ok. Different words for a different world. We let a thousand flowers flower, so to make available thoughts and practices (thinking, theory and practice is tightly linked after all in our daily lives) that can be useful for our pressing planetary issues and “thousand tiny anthropocene” situations.

With the critical, creative and curious activities of The Posthumanities Hub, we underline that this situation does not constitute a crisis for the humanities. Quite the contrary. Feminist and other critical posthumanities  constitute an opportunity for the arts and humanities. Feminist posthumanities entails really the reinvention of the humanities, making it societally salient. It generates new ideas pointing in the direction of the overcoming of anthropocentrism, eurocentrism, androcentrism, etc, on a planet modestly described as “naturecultural” in character, while reimagining the legacy and sophistication of previous work in the humanities, in history, philosophy, gender studies, science and technology studies, and other fields. Our motto is that it is crucial for the contemporary posthumanities to generate the networked communities, literacies and the methodological schemes needed to establish productive dialogues with these new developments, and with predecessor imperatives of “oppositional consciousness” as Chela Sandoval would call it, within the arts and sciences. Building on the historical emphases of the humanities, we want to keep questions germane to (embodied and environed) subjectivity (personhood) and its sociability. However, we must also always ask what the status of the subject and of subjectivity is today with the change of relations between technology, institutions, and society. After all, the historical context we work in is also one in which now both democracy and human rights are anything but given issues any longer (if they ever were). In our research, questions of knowledge production and world-making fuse with those of power, politics and ethics. Such overarching themes also impel the renewed questions of social responsibility and societal relevance of the arts and the humanities at large. Feminist posthumanities, like art and science, have the ability to expand our much too limited humanist imagination in society, and to explore best-practices of planetary conviviality across societies of both human and nonhuman kinds.

In our empirically diverse research we ask: what (and whom) gets to count as natural, as human, as animal, and to the detriment of benefit of whom? And of course, how could it be different? Such queries drives this postconventional research group but also some seriously humorous feminist creativity and desires to make (for) better connections in the world. The postdisciplinary challenge of the planetary situation today requires simply radical new forms of human and more-than-human humanities. And we are here to meet up.

Follow the seminars and public sessions of The Posthumanities Hub here: https://posthumanities.net/ or on Facebook.