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. 

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 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.  

In the concluding chapter (chapter 17 of EUP's book The Edinburgh Companion to the New Humanities, written by Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti, the emergence and need for versatile forms of feminist posthumanities is mapped out. Åsberg and Braidotti, building on their respective previous works on feminist posthumanities and the posthuman in feminist philosophy, describe and introduce a multi-valent new field of research fields within and beyond the new humanities. 

Prata med plantor – går det? 6 juli 2023Artikel från forskning.seÄmne: Miljö & klimat, Natur & teknik - ABIGAIL SYKES

I naturen pågår ständiga samtal – som människor inte lärt sig uppfatta. Men det går att kommunicera med växter och vi gör det också hela tiden, säger forskare. De senaste åren har forskning visat att tomatplantor ”skriker” när de klipps av, att växter lär sig att en del beröring inte är farlig samt att de varnar varandra för hot. Är växter smartare än vi trodde, och vad betyder det i så fall för hur vi behandlar dem?

Växter, träd och andra organismer kommunicerar med varandra genom ljud, ljus, beröring samt framför allt kemiska signaler som dofter både ovan och under jord. Genom sammankopplade nätverk av rötter och svamptrådar sänder exempelvis starkare träd näring till svagare träd .

Nyligen kom en studie från universitetet i Tel Aviv som visade att tomat- och tobaksplantor avger högfrekventa ljud när de utsätts för torka eller klipps av – ljud som forskarna först spelade in med ultraljudsmikrofoner och sedan upp i ett långsammare tempo så att människor kunde höra dem som ett klickande.

Dr Alison Sperling of Technische Universität Berlin presented work on Weid Queer Ecologies.

The presentation might come available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCceWDyovuMbKpYVgiKYI_gw 

Violent but slow changes to marine climates and blue biodiversity, to warming oceans and coastal areas have been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. Instead, this chapter begins from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural studies-informed approaches of more-than-human arts (posthumanities put to practice) to complement scientific insight on how to consume better with the sea. Human-induced impacts range from ocean warming and acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of coastal environments and habitats. In order to deal with the nested challenges of such oceanic environmental violence in terms of consumption and grief, we propose to show four cases of coastal and marine slow violence from our Scandinavian “backyards” with the purpose to story exposures and provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist ocean imaginary. From diverse locations in the field and in research, we have developed what is here referred to as “low trophic theory”, a situated local stance that attends to entanglements of cultural theory, food practice, affect and grief, violence, more-than-human humanities, multispecies ethics, and the oceanic consumer imaginary. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, eco-art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region. In the process, we develop analytical notions for the practices and theories of feminist posthumanities. Here in particular as targeted arts of learning to live and die, consume less violently, and to grieve on a damaged blue planet. 

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.      

Ai technologies are increasingly used by artists and creatives, and they as any other (technological) artefacts are embedded with the values and practices part of their historical development. These, for example, include desensitized embodied orientations of being in the world, involving practices such as disregard, abuse, and exploitation of non-human (e.g. the climate) and human (e.g. gender and racialization in relation to power). Our relation to the world and how technologies get designed are formed by our socio-cultural practices, values and norms - such as the predominant human-centered value sets (with embedded imbalances in favouring some humans more than others) and the Euro-modern perception that assumes a divide between human culture and nonhuman nature [18, 19, 27]. Sustaining practices of embedding such values does not necessarily serve the kinds of futures we want to make in terms of democracy, environmental, and social sustainability, and we argue that they should be re-thinked and critiqued. Thus, in this paper, we develop a critique of Creative-Ai through exposing tensions in the artifacts and agents situated in the ’Creative-Ai phenomena’ through speculative care imaginaries and by taking a feminist post-humanist orientation. We address the question of how care imaginaries/speculations can help us to unpack these desensitized and human-centered values and practices potentially embedded in Creative-Ai. We hope this paper to spark discussions and imaginaries on alternative ways of being with and thinking about Creative-Ai technologies particularly through the lens of ’care’. We conclude by discussing alternative care imaginaries as a method to reveal and in turn diversify the value sets and perspectives engaged in constructing Creative-Ai in the communities partaking in constructing these emerging technologies.

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. 

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.

Vi menar i den här korta essän att öar, som det planerade, offentliga konstverket Future Island, har mycket att lära oss. De tränar vår förmåga att se stora sammanhang, ”connect the dots”. Med öar,som per definition ligger vid marginalerna av fast mark eller till och med långt ute till havs, tränas vår föreställningsförmåga. Det behövs nu när vi måste anpassa oss på nytt, till en miljö- och klimatförändrad värld. Nu när vi måste lära oss leva med ovissa klimatframtider behövs testscenarion och projektionsytor för tänkbara framtider, som Future Island-verket. Här har vetenskap och tekniken självklar plats – i egenskap av datainsamling och observationer av möjliga scenarier. Men för att verkligen öva vår föreställningsförmåga, och därmed vår anpassningsförmåga, i en redan miljöförändrad värld, krävs mer än disparat information. Det behövs mer än tekniska beräkningar, vetenskapliga övervakningssystem och informativa utbildningsinsatser. Nu krävs inlevelse, fantasiförmåga, spekulationer, nya horisonter och nya sätt att se sammanhang. Inte minst krävs avoss alla idag konsten att leva med det okända, det omätbara.

Forskningskommunikation kring klimat och hållbarhet måste också förmedla kunskapen och känslan av att framtiden går att påverka. Det skriver Cecilia Åsberg som lett ett tvärvetenskapligt projekt (RECLAIMING FUTURES) som vänt sig till gymnasieungdomar. Nu ska erfarenheterna från projektet omsättas i undervisningen.

Feminist theories have long been concerned with the violent impact of (normative) Universal Man on society and nature, aconsequence of a modern phantasy divide between Nature and Culture. In this planetary era some call the Anthropocene, it isclearer to us how the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. The modern Nature/Culture divideimplodes violently on itself. For too long those regarded as less cultured, less-than-human and particularly nonhumans,like the very ecologies that sustains us, have been approached as mere resours or background for Universal Man. What canbe done - in practice, in thinking and in scholarship in such a situation?The present postnatural situation disrupts modern figurations of thought and scholarly practice, and begs new ones. Withclimate change, oceanic disturbance, habitat loss and rampant species extinction on the one hand, and new syntheticbiologies, technobodies and algorithms we live by on the other, it asks feminist sciences and arts for extradisciplinaryresponses, for new designs of practice.No longer can a division of academic labour be sustained, where technoscience does naked facts, use/abuse nonhumans andextract raw nature while artistic research, humanities and social science does culture, ethics and politics. Spurred by morethan-human feminisms, thicker forms of situated knowing have already emerged, for instance as practices of critical, creativeand feminist posthumanities.Such more-than-human humanities come in response to the pressing need to a) alter and decolonize such dividing knowledgeforms and to b) change the very ways we think, eat, and live with nonhumans in society. Sharing a Darwinian feeling forhow everything is connected, critically and creatively, with a relational ethics of care and concern, more-than-humanfeminisms and postdisciplinary disciplines, have paved way for environmental humanities and other more-than-human formsof the posthumanities. What are the stakes and challenges in these transformations? Why do we need them? And whatfeminist genealogies gets recognized?This lively round-table talk brings diverse scholars together for a spirited conversation on the usefulness and potential impactof feminist theorizing on sustainability, design, and on how to bring art and science to the social humanities, and insights tothe people living in a more-than-human world. It will be fun, but deadly serious.  

More-than-human feminisms across arts and sciences

Feminist theories have long been concerned with the violent impact of (normative) Universal Man on society and nature, aconsequence of a modern phantasy divide between Nature and Culture. In this planetary era some call the Anthropocene, it isclearer to us how the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. The modern Nature/Culture divideimplodes violently on itself. For too long those regarded as less cultured, less-than-human and particularly nonhumans,like the very ecologies that sustains us, have been approached as mere resours or background for Universal Man. What canbe done - in practice, in thinking and in scholarship in such a situation?The present postnatural situation disrupts modern figurations of thought and scholarly practice, and begs new ones. Withclimate change, oceanic disturbance, habitat loss and rampant species extinction on the one hand, and new syntheticbiologies, technobodies and algorithms we live by on the other, it asks feminist sciences and arts for extradisciplinaryresponses, for new designs of practice.No longer can a division of academic labour be sustained, where technoscience does naked facts, use/abuse nonhumans andextract raw nature while artistic research, humanities and social science does culture, ethics and politics. Spurred by morethan-human feminisms, thicker forms of situated knowing have already emerged, for instance as practices of critical, creativeand feminist posthumanities.Such more-than-human humanities come in response to the pressing need to a) alter and decolonize such dividing knowledgeforms and to b) change the very ways we think, eat, and live with nonhumans in society. Sharing a Darwinian feeling forhow everything is connected, critically and creatively, with a relational ethics of care and concern, more-than-humanfeminisms and postdisciplinary disciplines, have paved way for environmental humanities and other more-than-human formsof the posthumanities. What are the stakes and challenges in these transformations? Why do we need them? And whatfeminist genealogies gets recognized?

G22 Round-table panel, convened by Cecilia Åsberg and The Posthumanities Hub.

Participants:

Cecilia Åsberg1 , Marietta Radomska2 , Christina Fredengren3 , Jesse Peterson4 , Janna Holmstedt5 , Caroline KlingborgElgh 6  and Martin Avila7

1)Professor, Docent, Professor, Tema: Tema Genus, Linköpings Universitet

2) Fil Dr, Biträdande Lektor, Tema: Tema Genus, Linköpings Universitet

3) Professor Konstvetenskapliga Institutionen: Kulturvård, Uppsala Universitet

4) Fil Dr, Postdoktor, Tema Genus, Linköpings universitet and postdok Ekologi, Statens Lantbruksuniversitet

5) Fil Dr, Forskare, Forskningsavdelningen, Statens Historiska Muséer

6) MA, Doktorand, Tema: Tema Genus, Linköpings Universitet

7) Professor, Dr, Professor, Design, Konstfack

Detta miljökommunikationsevent var ett konstnärligt och vetenskapligt event som utgör en del av det ungdomsorienterade FORMAS projeketet Reclaiming Futures, där forskare och vetenskapskommunikatörer och konstnärliga gestaltare under ett år arbetat med olika ungdomsgrupper med uttrycks- och gestaltningstekniker så som kortfilm, stop-motion animation, dokumentär, poesi, association, kurerande av utställningar och annan konstnärlig gestaltning. 

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.   

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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.

Environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like ecological disasters usually recognised by the general public, and ‘slow violence’, a type of violence that occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale. Planetary seas and oceans, loaded with cultural meanings of that which ‘hides’ and ‘allows to forget’, are the spaces where such attritional violence unfolds unseen and ‘out of mind’. Simultaneously, conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous entities, become obsolete. We all inhabit and embody the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world. This chapter focuses on subtle ‘slow violence’ unfolding through the instances of submerged chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and high- and low-trophic mariculture in the Baltic and North Sea regions. It zooms in on the select cases of such ‘environed bodies’, their stories of excruciating slow violence and yet also on unexpected encounters with care and hospitality. The aim is to unfold a low-trophic theory for the naturecultural research on violence and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by feminist posthumanities.

This piece introduces the research topic of philosophy of technology, especially ethics, and it is done in the light of climate change.

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.  

This piece introduces the broad research topic of gender and technology.

First of all, it has been a fantastic time at KTH with new and old collaborations across disciplines, paving the way for the reinvented, new humanities of societal relevance. The Posthumanities Hub (PH) has since March 2018 until February 2021 had its main institutional home at KTH, where our founding director Cecilia Åsberg worked as Guest Professor in Science and Technology Studies focusing on Gender and Environment. Dr. Janna Holmstedt, artistic director and coordinator, has worked at KTH as research engineer since May 2019, and co-director Dr. Marietta Radomska has been based at Linköping University and Helsinki University.

As a research group and network of networks for philosophy, arts, and sciences informed by advanced cultural critique and creativity, we host visiting researchers, public events, seminars and symposia. From such collaborative vantage points, we bring science and nonhumans to the humanities, and transformational humanities to the people. The Posthumanities Hub collaborates with other institutions through our research group, visiting scholars, affiliated researchers, advisory board, and international networks. For instance, during these three years we have worked with Bonniers Konsthall and Färgfabriken in Stockholm, the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Lofoten Art Festival in Norway, the International Science Festival in Göteborg, The Public Art Agency Sweden, the Finnish Bioart Society, and UNESCO World Humanities: Europe, to mention a few.We have been giving talks, PhD responses, and keynotes, at Swedish and international universities, art events, research conferences, and at the Swedish Radio. We have hosted more than 20 seminars at KTH as part of The Posthumanities Hub Seminar Series, which since 2020 have been taking place online, with the number of participants skyrocketing from 30 to 150.

Marietta Radomska has set up a sub-group of the Posthumanities Hub, focusing on Eco- and Bioart research. Janna Holmstedt has initiated the Humus Economicus Collaboratory, focusing on human-soil relations. Cecilia Åsberg and Hub-researcher Christina Fredengren are finalizing the project Checking in with Deep Time, and Åsberg will explore AI and the Artistic Imaginary with André Holzapfel and Bob Sturm, KTH.

Among the varied activities we have engaged in besides research are:

• Open Humanities Lab Symposium: New Humanities and Anthropocene we organized at KTH, with 25 extra-ordinary speakers (2019)

• a mixed and postdisciplinary gathering of artists and researchers on the theme of /Mis/communication/s/ in KTH’s Reaktorhallen, curated by Janna Holmstedt on invitation by The Public Art Agency Sweden (2019);

• PH has been a proud partner and participant in The Kelp Congress, Lofoten International Festival (LIAF), NO (2019), the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University, Canada, and the State of the Art Network, a Nordic-Baltic network of artists, practitioners, researchers, and organizations exploring the role, responsibility, and potential of art and culture in the Anthropocene (2018 –present).

• We’ve initiated two Formas Communication Projects (Åsberg) involving students, in collaboration with Bromma gymnasium, Färgfabriken in Stockholm and Art Lab Gnesta.

Our teaching focuses on gender, environment and sustainability. We were proud to inherit Gender and Technology (Åsberg), a flagship course of the Division that we ran 2019 – 2020 with students doing MAs in engineering. In 2020 we started up the new PhD course Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities with Meike Schalk at KTH School of Architecture, with over 30 participants from many corners of the world. Both courses were very highly rated and appreciated, to the degree of forming new lively phd-networks (Genderation for Future Sustainability Network).

Read more about the research group,our companions, seminars, projectsand events here:http://posthumanities.net/http://www.facebook.com/posthumanitieshub/

Director and founder:Cecilia Åsberg, KTH/LiU.co-director:Marietta Radomska, LiU.artistic director and coordinator:Janna Holmstedt, KTH.senior strategic advisor:Christina Fredengren, SU. Ragnar Holm postdoc:Lina Rahm, KTH. 

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.

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 chapter takes departure in the experience gathered through our participation in two workshops: Kelp Curing and Coast, Line, forming part of the Kelp Congress, as well as our daily research and art practices.

We take kelp as material entities immersed in a multitude of relations with other creatures (for whom kelp serves as both nourishment and shelter) and inorganic elements of the milieu it resides in, on the one hand, and as a figuration: a material-semiotic “map of contestable worlds” that encompasses entangled threads of “knowledge, practice and power” (Haraway 1997, 11) in its local and global sense, on the other. While drawing on our field notes from the congress and feminist posthumanities and environmental humanities literatures (e.g. Alaimo 2016; Åsberg & Braidotti 2018; Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Iovino & Opperman 2014)  – with a special focus on the so-called blue humanities/oceanic humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019) – that unpack human/nonhuman relations in the context of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), we mobilise a reflection on and make a proposal for “thinking with kelp” as a multi-faceted methodology of transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge production and practices: situated (Haraway 1988), enfleshed, transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010), collaborative, and committed to an ethics of multispecies response-ability (Haraway 2008).

This is an interview done by previous Seed Box/Posthumanities Hub postdoc, Dr Olga Cielemecka (University of Tartu) with prof Cecilia Åsberg. In a conversation on what the arts of sustainability can offer in the Anthropocene, Åsberg is presented as a feminist scholar of environmental humanities, posthumanities and other forms of the new humanitie. Äsberg has pionnered planetary humanities thinking and has been part of the early international EH research interest in the oceanic, in critical ocean studies, blue humanities or even the oceanic and coastal humanities (many terms are afloat),  along with a handful of other feminist environmental humanities scholars. Åsberg points to the emminent pioneers, such as Stacey Alaimo and Elizabeth de Loughrey - and of course (from the 1950s) Rachel Carson herself, and to the many interconnections between feminist new materialism and environmental humanities today.  

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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? 

This glossary entry describes what feminist posthumanities may entail.

In this chapter, Åsberg and Braidotti, delineates the geneaologies of feminist posthumanities, drawing on cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies but also environmental, medical and digital humanities as these are enlivningen the contemporary interdisciplinary humanities with critique, creativity and curiosity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter explores the meaning of "nature" through the modern history of science and contemporary experimental practices from feminist science studies perspectives.  

This paper explores the contemporary Nordic environmental imaginary from the starting point in the Gotland Deep and the dumpings of chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea.

In this chapter, we will investigate the visual confguration of what we term a  Swedish Viagra imaginary, a cultural phantasy landscape that produces and repro- duces certain subject positions of great interest for feminists and other scholars invested in social change. More precisely, we interrogate a set of key images pre- sented by the Pfzer-sponsored website for potential Swedish Viagra customers with erectile dysfunction in order to explore how this particular Viagra imaginary provides reference points for shared and collective identities. We explore here the  visual formation, and the naturalization, of the nationally shaped masculinity of the potential consumers of Viagra at a Swedish-language site, www.potenslinjen.se/,  the same site discussed in Chapter 6. This site is produced by the pharmaceutical 2 company Pfzer for the explicit purpose of providing the Swedish public with health  information on erectile problems.