Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub

The Posthumanities Hub is a post-conventional Humanities research group and a platform for scholarly exchanges. Hosted by Tema Genus (the interdisciplinary unit of Gender Studies, at the TEMA insitute, Linköping University), it also constitutes one of the research strands in Gender Studies directed by Cecilia Åsberg. 

Expanding the relevance and scope of the critical humanities, The Posthumanities Hub works as a confluence, a point of juncture for streams of inventive scholarship within feminist research, human-animal studies, environmental humanities, critical biochemistry, queer- and crip theory, cultural studies of science, medicine and technology, and many other interdisciplinary areas of research across the natural sciences, medicine, engineering, the humanities, the educational and social sciences. 

We aim for creative and critical research, transgressive collaborations, scholarly networking and education within a broadly defined feminist framework of "posthumanities". The term "posthumanities" (coined by Cary Wolfe) signals to us a post-disciplinary call to step out of the analytical comfort zones of both the humanities and the social, medical, educational and natural sciences. It opens up for explorations of the performativity and the vulnerability of variously situated "naturecultures" (coined by Donna Haraway), and for the the entangled relationships of knowledge and power, materiality and meaning, subjectivity and objectivity in matters of concern to contemporary societies (ie Alzheimer's Disease, environmental awareness, the theories of health, body, consciousness and imagination at work in everydaylife and in academic thought and practice, which are the theories we use, perhaps inadvertently, to sort out and make sense of ourselves and others). 

This post- or intradisciplinary framework circumscribes here, for our research team, several research interests and converging projects (among them twelve doctoral projects, and a steady stream of visiting scholars). All of our projects engage with interdisciplinary gender studies (but not necessarily with gender as the sole analytical category), and the field's recent attention to the entanglements of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. This means asking philisophical questions to concrete situations or empirical materials, like, what is this in effect? How do we know that, what is our relationship to it, and how can we encounter it well? Feminist theory guides us into new places. It is a heterogenous tradition of thought across several disciplines with a smallest common denominator in the study of relationality (differences women-men, women-women, men-men, within the Self, or, Man-nonhuman others).  

Whether we study, say, new medical and molecular understandings of Alzheimer's Disease, its phenomenology and social impact, or care-robots and contemporary embodiments, or the material-semiotics of breathing, or the gendering of car cultures and youthful automobility, or queer visual cultures and the trans-gender/sex motif in cinema, the cultural pedagogy of climate change and how teacher education grapples with sustainable development, or truant girls in school, human-animal relations in the lab, the mutual feedback between art and science in re-thinking "life", the human-look-alikes in science fiction (and what they say about us), feminist Estonian art photography in the post-soviet semi-periphery, or the gendered assumptions around the HPV-vaccine, ... we share an interest in what gets to count as human, inhumane or non-human (animal, machine, environment) in the relations we live and die by, the relationships and relationalities that make, or break, us.  

In sum, The Posthumanities Hub corresponds to one of the research streams at Tema Genus, (posthumanist gender studies); it is a post-conventional research group, and a platform for visiting scholars who share in our kind of curiosity. Founded and funded in 2008-2009 as of the Linköping University Research Fellow-initiative, The Posthumanities Hub is directed by Cecilia Åsberg, Assoc. Prof, Deputy Head of Tema Genus and Co-Director of Gexcel International Collegium (Gexcel = Centre of Gender Excellence as internationally evaluated by the Swedish Research Council).