In lieu of an abstract: This volume gathers Swedish and international Human Animal Studies scholars on the topic of human animal geographies.

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Background:

Oophorectomy prior to natural menopause places women at increased risk of dementia and/or Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recent findings from our Toronto group reveal a negative association between oophorectomy prior to natural menopause and verbal memory in middle-aged women. We have also found a positive association between estrogen levels and verbal recall. Taken together, these findings support previous work suggesting that oophorectomy, leading to reduced levels of estrogens, is detrimental to verbal memory. Estrogen withdrawal has also been correlated with reduced hippocampal volume and reduced hippocampal resting functional connectivity (FC), both early AD biomarkers. Thus, we wondered whether hippocampal volume and resting functional connectivity would be reduced in women with oophorectomy prior to natural menopause.

Methods:

In order to determine this, we recruited healthy, Swedish women (30 and 55 years) with the breast cancer mutation gene (BRCA1/2) who had a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) prior to natural menopause. Most women were between 1–7 years post-BSO and at least 6 months post-cancer treatment or had not had cancer. Using magnetic resonance imaging (3T scanner, Phillips) we measured functional resting state over 10 minutes and volume with a T1 structural scan. We collected urine in order to determine estrogen and progesterone levels.

Results:

We hypothesize that women with BSO will have structural and functional hippocampal changes compared to age matched controls. We predict that women with BSO will have smaller hippocampal volumes and reduced hippocampal FC. We further predict that lower levels of estrogens will correlate with these brain changes. Neuroimaging and endocrine analyses are ongoing.

Conclusions:

AD affects women in greater numbers and one possibility is that oophorectomy prior to natural menopause contributes to these numbers. Determining whether or not these women show the earliest biomarkers for AD will increase our understanding of estrogen withdrawal's effects on brain health as well as its importance for healthy brain aging. Importantly, results of this study will inform us on the early brain changes in a population at greater risk of AD.

Starting from the assumptions of feminist perspectives from various forms of re-invented humanities, this chapter approaches the major research question of how better to re-tie the material and immaterial knots between past, present and future generations for heritage research. This is a research question guiding us in our project on deep-time interventions and intragenerational care that we explore here through the multi-temporal site of the Gärstad waste-to-energy plant. This plant resides just outside the town of Linköping in south-east Sweden, a site we often pass by on our way home or to the university. The over-arching intent of our research is to contribute to the sociocultural and material transformations needed for us all to become more gracious ancestors for multispecies generations to come.

This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multifaceted intersec-tions of technology, embodiment, identity, and ecology through the lens of cyborg knowing. The first contribution focuses on the vulnerabilities faced by individuals with implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), emphasizing the crucial need for acclimatization strategies and agency in navigating their cybernetic embodiment as “everyday cyborg”. The second contribu-tion critically examines cultural technologies revealing their role in perpet-uating biases and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on feminist STS and cyborg theory, to adaptively reshape societal constructs. Lastly, the third contribution envisions a comprehensive theory of cyber-zoa that extends the cyborg figuration to encompass nonhuman animals, fostering a post-anthropocentric perspective and an ecologically attuned examination of power relations, exploitation, and symmetrical relation-ships. By engaging with the concept of the cyborg, these contributions shed light on the complex dynamics and transformative potentials inher-ent in the realm of technology for both human and nonhuman lives

In this exploratory paper, we focus on intersecting design political and visual processes of gendering and racializing in online AI image generators, in particular ArtBreeder and Midjourney. While AI image generators are becoming an integrated part of our contemporary society, they draw on cultural and historical imaging conventions of sorting and ordering the world and the people in it. These tools' powerful visual rhetoric can potentially aggravate existing discrimination, if not critically reflected upon. We argue that these design-facilitated representations position the 'user' into cultural imagery of representations with political implications. With an intersectional perspective from the feminist visual analysis, we critique and uncover how gender and ethnicity are represented and built into the systems, both in terms of visual culture and in designed interactions. We problematize these design strategies, and urge the HCI community to engage in further design political inquiries regarding the visual culture mediated by AI image generators.

Cultural and social studies of sildenafil (Viagra) have shown how it in influence more than just blood flow in the penis. Sildenafil has introduced the term "erectile dysfunction" (ED) to the general public, changing wider cultural perceptions and the treatment of impotence. This article presents results from a study on how this pharmaceutical drug was introduced to a Swedish audience, where direct-to-consumer marketing is not all allowed. Our studies of the online market information (presented as health education) show that not only does the globalization of the pharmaceutical market make medicines available to international consumers, it also spreads ideas about the healthy subjectivities— gendered identities and behaviors—those medicines are prescribing. This, we feel, calls for further critical consideration to articulate the prescribed social practices that prescription medicines carry.

An exploration of how global pharmaceutical products are localized - of what happens when they become ’glocal’ - this book examines the tensions that exist between a global pharmaceutical market and the locally bounded discourses and regulations encountered as markets are created for new drugs in particular contexts. Employing the case study of the emergence, representation and regulation of Viagra in the Swedish market, Glocal Pharma offers analyses of commercial material, medical discourses and legal documents to show how a Swedish, Viagra-consuming subject has been constructed in relation to the drug and how Viagra is imagined in relation to the Swedish man.

Engaging with debates about pharmaceuticalization, the authors consider the ways in which new identities are created around drugs, the redefinition of health problems as sits of pharmaceutical treatment and changes in practices of governance to reflect the entrance of pharmaceuticals to the market. With attention to ’local’ contexts, it reveals elements in the nexus of pharmaceutcalization that are receptive to cultural elements as new products become embedded in local markets.

An empirically informed study of the ways in which the presence of a drug can alter the concept of a disease and its treatment, understandings of who suffers from it and how to cure it - both locally and internationally - this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and science and technology studies with interests in globalization, pharmaceuticals, gender and the sociology of medicine.

Using the Pfizer funded Swedish informational site about erectile dysfunction (ED), www.potenslinjen.se, we examine how potential users, their partners, and medical doctors are enrolled in the process of creating the Swedish Viagra user. Contextualized against other critical work on Viagra, our analysis shows how the commercial discourse embeds the ED patient into a network of actors. Three separate actors are co-constituted and enrolled by this erectile dysfunction information discourse, comprising Viagra marketing material in a country which forbids direct to consumer advertising of prescription medication. Doctors are enrolled to produce the cultural authority of expert medical knowledge, whereas partners are given responsibility for the emotional aspects of a man’s sexuality and encouraged to direct the man toward the relationship-saving Viagra. Throughout, though, the man is the patient responsible for taking Viagra to fix his dysfunctioning penis. We problematize this individualised solution by contrasting it with the social aspects of the discourse and examining other qualitative and historical studies of impotence. We then ask if the enrolment presented by the Swedish Viagra website could be (mis)used to expand the circle of actors involved in ED, redefi ning the ‘problem’ and opening for a wider variety of treatments.

This chapter examines how men, their doctors and their partners are enrolled by the Pfizer-sponsored website for potential Swedish Viagra customers. We read this enrolment as an example of how new techno-social identities are created by a drug, in this case, Viagra. The Swedish-language site www.potenslinjen.se2 (in English, ‘potency hotline’) is framed as a source of information for laypeople concerned about erectile dysfunction.3 We have examined how the site’s text and imagery address different audiences in the construction of the Swedish Viagra man. Our analysis builds on existing literature about the promotion of Viagra which addresses the construction of erectile dysfunction (ED) and masculinity in other national contexts, and we therefore make mention of alternative images and readings in other contexts throughout our analysis. Like previous critical studies of Viagra (Fishman and Mamo 2001; Marshall 2006; Tiefer 2006; Vares and Braun 2006), we are examining the construction of an ideal user of Viagra, but we also discuss the way the enrolment of doctors and partners serves to position ED in the man and define its treatment as a solitary act of taking a pill while simultaneously involving the other actors to help the medicine function.

The project that triggered this book was named “Prescriptive Prescriptions. Pharmaceuticals and ‘Healthy’ Subjectivities.” As discussed in Chap.  1, Introduction, our initial task was to map out and explore how pharmaceuticals were prescribing healthy subject positions for the individuals targeted by them. But pharmaceuticals do much more than prescribe healthy personhood. They also prescribe healthy social relationships whose very existence and enactment can be imagined as requiring the consumption of a prescription medication. The two chapters in this part detail how this is done discursively by focusing on commercial images and texts used to market and sell Alzheimer’s, prostate and human papillomavirus pharmaceuticals.

The book is aimed at providing an assertion of Gender Studies as a vital community in our time, united in a commitment to inquiry. It brings forward an interdisciplinary set of early career researchers’ accounts of their motives for engaging in Gender Studies and, of the encounters with limitations as well as possibilities they experience on the paths they have chosen.

Each chapter is accompanied by a brief response paper where a more senior researcher involves in conversation with respective chapter’s content and shares reflections regarding Gender Studies, its integration, and developments. The first level corresponds with the significance of research in the field and its transformative power in and, crucially, outside the academia. The second relates to the value of networking and community building for doing research.

The book presents Gender Studies in a communicative, open manner that invites the reader to engage in and continue the displayed discussions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, sociology, queer studies, women’s studies, trans studies, anthropology, and literary studies.

This position paper outlines a multidirectional approach to what we call Anthropocene ecologies, its diverse genealogies, and methodological and conceptual foci. Under the heading of Anthropocene ecologies we seek to fertilize the sciences of ecology with approaches of queer and feminist new materialisms, and engage in multiple collaborations across the humanities, sciences, and everyday ecological practices. Specifically we draw on ecology as the object of analysis and the methodology, building on concepts and approaches from the sciences, material feminisms, science and technology studies, human/animal studies and material ecocriticism. Five modes of attention become particularly salient for our analysis of the Anthropocene ecologies of solar energy, humananimal relations, organic food production, wetlands, and human-robot relations. First we attend to how these ecologies are generated within and affect the webs of multispecies ecologies in late capitalism. Second we suggest the concept of biogeotechno-power to capture the entanglements of the biological, the geologic and the technological in new formations of power that invest, regulate, enhance, and dispose of (more-than-)human bodies in particular ecological relationalities. Third we examine the multiplicities of ecological temporalities, including the deep time of mineralisation, fossilisation and past and future species survival. Fourth we attend to affect as an entangling force in ecological relations. And fifth we investigate an affirmative posthuman ethics of concern and response-ability in relations with living and nonliving materialities that might not be close by (spatially and/or temporally). Anthropocene ecologies thereby include the technical, informational, temporal, affective, and ethical as integral parts of ecological intra-actions, and remain attuned to the differential, paradoxical and unexpected.

This chapter focuses on the fruit fly as model territories. It investigates both the practised and heavily trafficked corporeal site of the fly, laboratory technospace of human-animal interaction, and the wider biopolitical/biosocial domain, where boundaries between human and animal, life and death, nature and culture are constantly redrawn through the choreographies of the laboratory fly. Fruit flies are in fact quite small and take up very little space – in both laboratories and in the scientific ethical imaginary. Despite their influential position within natural sciences and laboratory life, these flies are exempted from most ethical protocols for animal models. The chapter focuses on a very specific species of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and how it in a way has embodied the very iconic emergence of the life sciences. It argues that – whatever view on animals in laboratory practice – they represent or index our disease for us.

At the end of World War II, tens of thousands of tons of chemical warfare agents - mostly mustard gas - were dumped in the Gotland Deep - a deep basin in the middle of the otherwise shallow Baltic Sea. Decades later, these weapons are being reactivated - both literally (perhaps on the faces of dead seals, and in fishermens nets) and also in our imaginations. In this story that recounts the beginning of our research into this situation, militarization meets with environmental concern: the past floats into the present, where humans and non-humans are equally implicated, where the sea itself conditions the kinds of questions we can ask, and answers we might get, and where terms like threat and risk remain undecided. After spending time on Gotland Island - the closest terrestrial site to these weapons dumps - we ask what kinds of research methods might be adequate to these tangled, underwater tales that we find so difficult to fathom.

This chapter proposes that climate imaginaries are a vital part of governance. In the particular context of the Anthropocene, there is a need to consider the kinds of orientations that an Anthropocene climate imaginary evokes, while also seeking out "alter-Anthropocene" imaginaries -- visions and practices that we might cultivate as engines of possibility for climate governance and beyond. To explore such alternatives, we use illustrations taken from climate art, supported by cultural theory emerging from critical feminist posthumanities. While feminist posthumanism is not typically connected to work on climate governance, we aver that its attention to the power of imaginaries to shape actions, as well as its focus on creative responses to worldly problems that are “more-than-human” in nature, present an important opportunity to address difficult-to-measure dimensions of climate governance: namely, the ability to reimagine ways of getting on in a world where humans are not the only bodies that matter, and where both humans and non-human bodies (including other species, elements, and geophysical forces) are entangled in the exigencies of climate change.

Elämä tavataan nähdä kuoleman vastakohtana. Tällaisen kahtiajaon ulkopuolelle mahtuu kuitenkin paljon ontologisia ja eettisiä kysymyksiä, joita on lähdettävä purkamaan toisesta suunnasta. Marietta Radomska ja Cecilia Åsberg ehdottavat suunnaksi biofilosofiaa, jossa elämistä ja kuolemista tarkastellaan yhteen kietoutuneina ja yhdessä muuttuvina.

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

I akademin är det vanligt att man högtidlighåller och firar framstående och seniora professorer som fyller jämt genom att författa en vänbok. Jag har i min egen bokhylla flera sådana volymer och de har alla det gemensamt att kollegor eller andra som står jubilaren nära har författat ett kapitel eller avsnitt. Temat för boken brukar vara ett särskilt vetenskapligt fält, en fråga eller en metod som ligger födelsedagsbarnet varmt om hjärtat. På så sätt visar man professorn sin uppskattning och tecknar i viss mån hans eller hennes vetenskapliga värv. Det du nu håller i din hand är just en sådan vänbok men av ett litet annat slag. Jubilaren i det här fallet är nämligen inte en person, inte någon framstående forskare och professor. Jubilaren som tillägnas denna bok är en mycket speciell organisation i det akademiska landskapet och heter Forum för genusvetenskap och jämställdhet. Anledningen till att vi författat denna vänbok är att Forum som inrättning vid Linköpings universitetfyllt 25 år och vi vill på detta sätt hylla vår vän!

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.

 Koningin Christina van Zweden ging in de 17e eeuw haar eigen gang. Lapte de verwachtingen van haar 'als vrouw' aan haar laars en was ook nog eens een toonaangevende intellectueel. Maar ze had ook een zeer lage dunk van datgene wat -typisch vrouwelijk- was en gaf bovendien vrijwillig haar macht op. Even slikken voor wie haar graag als recalcitrante koningin in het hart had gesloten. Maar toch een inspirerend rolmodel.

Den här boken introducerar några viktiga författare på samtidsaktuella teoriområden. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Serres och Annemarie Mol presenteras i boken, som också innehåller översatta texter av dessa namn. Boken ger en bakgrund till och en överblick över ett område i intensiv teoriutveckling. Här presenteras den så kallade materiella, posthumana eller ontologiska vändningen. Här kartläggs grunderna för olika posthumanistiska förhållningssätt till de både mänskliga och icke-mänskliga (djur, miljö, teknik) krafterna i vår värld så som de begreppsliggjorts inom filosofi, feministisk teori, kulturstudier och samhällsvetenskapliga studier av naturvetenskap, medicin och teknik. Genom lästips och en omfattande litteraturlista öppnar boken för fortsatta studier och vidare diskussioner. Avslutningsvis finns också en omfattande ordlista med viktiga nyckelbegrepp som i sig ger en introduktion till ett heterogent forskningsfält. Boken riktar sig till studenter, doktorander och andra nyfikna forskare inom olika tvärvetenskapliga eller disciplinära former av humaniora och samhällsvetenskap.

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere”

(Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937)  

The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity (in for instance my own “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). 

Myself, I will explore a couple of “alien species” in these waters, ranging cannisters of mustard gas to Pacific oysters and other storied bodies out of order, so to try to provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality. 

Adopting the "companion species" approach of Haraway—a grappling with charged bits of life—the ordinary story of my own relationships with an adopted mix-breed dog, "Blackie Lawless" assists my understanding in this essay. It makes the connection clear between Haraway’s cyborg concept, a a subspecies of her new, more comprehensive kin figuration of ‘‘companion species’’. Both are figures of lively ontology and ways of knowing within dynamic emergences of their times. As developed in Haraway's book, When Species Meet, ‘‘companion species’’ anchors a form of reluctant post-humanist approach that aims, not to discard anything related to humans, but to think people (and, to practice the humanities) differently. Haraway makes an argument for interspecies survival. In the following I offer my reading of When Species Meet, my bits and bites of sensation, frustration, and curiosity within Haraway’s dog land. Moreover, I also read Haraway in the light of three decades of feminist struggles to come to terms with the body, with biology, and with more-than human existences. I believe these struggles to be crucial for the future survival and proliferation of feminist scholarship, in terms of feminist forms of post-humanities as more humane and more-than-human humanities.

Cecilia Åsberg’s documentation of the coastal “wrack zone” in Scandinavia pays close attention to histories of militarization near Gotland and the convergence of leftover munitions alongside seaweeds that have been washed ashore, also on the Swedish westcoast. Åsberg describes a picturesque coastal background where “bony white and gray rock meet brown algae and the hope of finding amber” against decades of industrial, often military, waste, ranging from World War leftovers of munitions and mustard gas to agricultural fertilizers. Swayed by the seaweeds themselves through modes of writing that reflect drifts in attention at field sites along Scandinavian coastlines, or finding solidarity with seaweeds against extractive or colonial regimes, this piece aims to story sea-side exposures beyond damage narratives. 

In this essay to the section Crossing Boundaries of OA journal Technoscienza, I discuss the plethora of interdisciplinary approaches to the present world troubles from the prism offered by Donna J Haraway's concept of the cyborg and the situated knowledges ensuing in its wake.  

  "Concepts up for discussion: On the concept of genus in Swedish Gender Studies"

This article concerns a lively conceptual debatethat took place in Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift (Swedish Journal of Women's Studies) between 1980-1998. When Yvonne Hirdman, a Swedish historian, in 1988 introduced the concepts of gender and gender system in KVT (in Swedish: genus and genussystem), this sparked off intense discussions and caused theoretical divisions within Swedish feminism. Opinions were divided on the direction that one believed feminist theory should take. Should one strive for something like a new Grand Theory on women's subordination or should the aspirations be somewhat smaller?In this article the author illustrates the shifting emphases in the journal on such theoretical problems as essentialism versus social constructivism and agents of change versus stabile structures -perspectives. The article also takes into account the new challenges that different theories of a more or less postmodern nature put forward, for instance sexual difference theory. The ongoing feminist theoretical developmenthas included an expansion, both in terms of a broadening of the investigatory horizon and research delving deeper into various fields. Nowadays Women's Studies is part of the larger field of Gender Studies. Genus, today, signifies the growing amount of knowledge about sex and gender,femininity and masculinity, and is often conceptualized,not as a system, but as an ongoing identity forging process of historically changing ideas.

Jag menar att feministisk forskning står mitt i en posthumanistisk utmaning. När människor idag på ett alltmer uppenbart sätt är invävda i komplexa relationer till teknik, medicin och naturvetenskap, till andra djur, omgivning och miljö, skakas humanismens teorier om mänsklighetens villkor och etik, liksom dess exkluderande biopolitik, om ordentligt. Humanvetenskapernas omfång och räckvidd har också utmanats. Från det inre av ämnen som filosofi, historia och litteraturvetenskap har genusforskning tillsammans med cultural studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, science and literature studies sprungit fram och bidragit med grundläggande ifrågasättanden av humanioras studieobjekt, studiesubjekt, disciplinära normer, kunskapsregimer och maktrelationer. Humaniora är en mäktig traditionsbevarare, men också samtidigt en vital plats för kritik och uppfinningsrikedom. Det är en plats grogrund för ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv med utgångspunkt i feministisk teori.

A wealth of contemporary speculative practices on how to deal with life, death, and co-existence on a planet haunted by pandemics, mass species extinctions, climate change, and rampant societal injustice are currently circulating, in public — in academia, in art, and in activism. Existential concerns, what the humanities are well-equipped to handle, and new insights are sought after in public. So how can the humanities respond well? For instance to the normative notions of the human that make some people more killable than others (like the elderly COVID-patients in Swedish nursing homes, black men in the US, born or unborn girls in very poor communities, refugees in camps, indigenous environmental activists in the global South). How can the humanities make themselves, to use a term from Donna Haraway, respons-able for how a ‘normative human’ has also shaped the planet into such an inhabitable or even toxic place for many others? One answer, a well-trodden path by now, are the feminist posthumanities, and how they together (as environmental humanities, medical humanities, decolonial humanities, queer humanities, technohumanities, posthuman or multispecies humanities) question the exclusions and inclusions made in the name of the human and the humanities. Here theory meets practice, science meets art, and a transformational sense of humanity meets the people.   

Den här boken introducerar några viktiga författare på samtidsaktuella teoriområden. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Serres och Annemarie Mol presenteras i boken, som också innehåller översatta texter av dessa namn. Boken ger en bakgrund till och en överblick över ett område i intensiv teoriutveckling. Här presenteras den så kallade materiella, posthumana eller ontologiska vändningen. Här kartläggs grunderna för olika posthumanistiska förhållningssätt till de både mänskliga och icke-mänskliga (djur, miljö, teknik) krafterna i vår värld så som de begreppsliggjorts inom filosofi, feministisk teori, kulturstudier och samhällsvetenskapliga studier av naturvetenskap, medicin och teknik. Genom lästips och en omfattande litteraturlista öppnar boken för fortsatta studier och vidare diskussioner. Avslutningsvis finns också en omfattande ordlista med viktiga nyckelbegrepp som i sig ger en introduktion till ett heterogent forskningsfält. Boken riktar sig till studenter, doktorander och andra nyfikna forskare inom olika tvärvetenskapliga eller disciplinära former av humaniora och samhällsvetenskap.

We are currently witnessing a genuine proliferation of new feminist or pro-feminist work on posthumanities, in art and research, in Sweden as in other corners of the world. What matters most to me as a feminist scholar is the synergy and new conversations within feminist theory, and what they can do. Reinventing the humanities today can no longer signify the relaunching of a school of thought, style, or theory with a hegemonic vocation. It must entail the very recomposition of disciplinarity, theory, and everyday doing. Feminist posthumanities testify not to any crisis of the content, rigor, or intellectual liveliness of the humanities and adjacent social sciences, but to its sociability in the more-than-human domains. Feminist posthumanities, with its mixed origin stories and foremothers, are to me the becoming minoritarian of collective academic insight, and it comes with both its perks (great networking, new experiences, fun, failures, and situated insights), and setbacks (this type of research is not easily funded, often short-lived, and project-based). It is needed more now than ever, as we need communities that work together, across the ecologies and technologies of the postnatural condition we often simply call the Anthropocene.

In this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or "rotifers," emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research (and others) might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

Vår tids stora fråga rör handling, vad en kan göra när nästan all form av handling framstår som besudlad eller oren? Vilka är möjligheterna  för tanke och handling i en anda av samexistens i splittrad värld? Inom litteraturvetenskaperna har ekokritiken definierat ett brett område som snabbt etablerat en uppsjö teoretiska positioner. Ekokritiska metoder har också påverkat näraliggande forskningsämnen och varit viktiga för etableringen av nyhumanioran som erbjuds inom ramen för miljöorienterad humaniora, environmental humanities. Miljö- och hållbarhetsfrågor som samhället brottas med idag gör ekokritisk kreativitet än mer aktuell. I mitt efterord till boken Ekokritiska metoder emfaserar jag ekokritikens roll och relation inom miljöhumaniora och samtidsdebatt. Jag pekar mot en kreativ-skapande-görande approach till berättande som gör ekokritik till en mer än mänsklig angelägenhet i en värld som snabbt förändras och som behöver lika snabbt föränderliga analysansatser. Mer än mänsklig humaniora (posthumaniora), ekokritik, ekofeminismer och miljöhumaniora omarbetar frentetiskt - och i samarbeten - idag vår självsyn och kulturella berättelser för att bättre fungera med en splittrad och skadad värld. Den går från ord till handling.      

The cyborg is a figure we now easily connect with early 1990s feminist technoscience studies,indeed it is a foundational figure of the field. However, cyborgs do not just trace older, but also a lot more ambiguous and less feminist roots within our technoscientific modernity. Theaim of this article is to provide a genealogical map of feminist entanglements with especiallythe biological sciences and with the body. In particular, I aim here to show how the figure of the cyborg in fact might be positioned as the first sign materializing and anticipating what wetoday might call the ontological turn within feminist theory and technoscience studies.

This chapter, on the oceanic and seaweed work of artist Signe Johannessen, explores extra-disciplinarity in the registers of art, philososphy and science in order to outline the emerging arts of sustainability for learning to live better on a damaged planet.  

In lieu of an abstract.

This chapter describes the watery and sea side works of Scandinavian artist Signe Johannessen, especially her work on kelp, sea weed and oceanic arts. 

This glossary entry describes what feminist posthumanities may entail.

In the new planetary age of the Anthropocene or the Age of Man (as it were), humanity is cast as a single geological force, a major force of environmental destruction, and one folding in on itself. The Anthropocene is famously defined by human-induced climatic, biological, and geological transformations of our planet, by a profound anthropogenic environmental impact and mass species extinctions. However, the Anthropocene risk also, as pointed out by a wide range of feminist philosophers and critical scholars, to hide troublesome differences between humans, and also to hide intimate relationships between technology, humans, and other animals. This totalization of humanity is a parallel risk in some posthuman theorizing also, and something postdisciplinary scholars of the critical humanities and feminist philosophers have paid attention to for decades. In the posthuman context of the Anthropocene, I suggest and point to postdisciplinary humanities research and theory-practices that pay careful attention to the feminist theoretical work on our equally postnatural condition as an experimental remedy.