TRAJECTORIES OF THE POSTHUMAN
Fall, 2014 (CSPT 500/600/Poli 533/633)
Thurs, 10am-12:50pm, TEF 170
Dr. Arthur Kroker (kroker@uvic.ca)
“Trajectories of the Posthuman” is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar that
will explore the fate of the body in contemporary politics and society
through the writings of critical feminist theory, including Judith Butler,
Wendy Brown, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles.
What is the future of the multiple bodily practices that powerfully shape the
times in which we live? Will the future posthuman be driven by a politics of
bodily prohibition bounded by questions of grievability (Butler), by
increasingly violent subjectivities acting on the basis of a “politics of
anger”(Brown), by hybrid bodies living at the interface of gender, race,
ethnicity and class (Haraway), by recognition that the future has already
evolved to new bodily assemblages of objects that come alive and bodies
that literally matter (Bennett), or, perhaps, by those complex bodies that
inhabit a contemporary period in which “information (may have) lost its
body” but the bodily multiplicity that we are is always entangled with
unfinished questions of material embodiment and technological
transcendence (Hayles).
The seminar will also involve guest lectures on trajectories of the posthuman
by Professor Nikolas Kompridis (Institute for Social Justice, Australian
Catholic University) and Professor Frances Dyson (University of New South
Wales).