Vi vill med det här kandidatarbetet problematisera människans distanstagande från dess släktskap och samevolution med djur och maskiner. Tillsammans med bland annat Donna Haraways cyborgfenomen, följeslagande arter och snörlekar vill vi påvisa samhörigheten mellan medvetna varelser. För att skapa nya förhållningssätt och perspektiv för släktskapet använde vi oss av naturliga användargränssnitt, artificiell intelligens, designfiktion, Haraways snörlekar och kvalitativt undersökande som tolkande undersökande. Med de här begreppen som grund i undersökningens gestaltande har vi undersökt kommunikationens kritiska roll i relationer mellan medvetna varelser. Vi har med hjälp av naturliga användargränssnitt undersökt tillvägagångssätt för att påvisa människans samevolution med maskiner och hur människor kan förstå dem som jämställda varelser i samhället. Vi förstår även naturliga användargränssnitt som exemplifiering för att argumentera medvetna maskiner som, likt människor, en jämställd varelse i samhället. / In this Bachelor thesis we want to problematize denial of human relations with animals and machines. With, among other things, Donna Haraways cyborg, companion species and string figures, we want to show the fellowship between aware creatures. To create new approaches and perspectives for the relations between humans, animals and machines, we use natural user interfaces, artificial intelligence, design fiction, Haraways string figures and qualitative research to look into this thesis problem area. These ideas and concepts, as roots of this thesis, was used to form and design the thesis artifact. To show communications critical role in relations between aware creatures. We have, with natural user interfaces, researched approaches to show human relations and fellowship with machines. But also how to understand them as equal creatures. Natural user interfaces is also used in this thesis to show an example of how to discuss artificial intelligence as equals to humans in society.

Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome is a science-fiction which deals with subalter voice. In this paper I have discussed that how Ghosh has written an alternative hisory for the suabltern and how he establishes a connection between subaltern and the science-fictional term, the posthuman. I also argue that through such representation Ghosh proposes a open ended way to think about the subaltern future as well.

This dissertation sets out to explore the animal presence in the novels of contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq. Focusing on this often overlooked aspect in the growing number of publications dedicated to Houellebecq’s literary production, this study argues that the presence of animals is central to understanding how his novels are structured around borders between not only animals and humans but also between humans themselves. By pitting animals against humans the novels simultaneously show how these borders are created within the narratives only to be repeatedly broken down and/or transgressed. Whereas in previous research a posthumanvision in Houellebecq’s works has been largely attributed to the theme of a technological surpassing of the human, this study advances the idea that animals constitute an inherent part of Houellebecq’s questioning of an anthropocentric worldview. The first chapter of the thesis, which lays the foundation for the study, explores how descriptions structure two major ways in which animals are present: either as a backdrop setting where the characters, while trying to maintain the border between themselves and animals, are transformed into observers of animals in their natural habitat, or as metaphors used to describe appearances and seemingly unwanted personality traits of some of the characters. The second chapter expands on the idea of a frontier between animals and humans but contrary to the previous chapter it studies the porosity of these borders by showing how humans and animals are depicted and narrated in similar ways. Drawing on the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Dominique Lestel and Tristan Garcia the study concludes by proposing to read Houellebecq’s novels both as a form of life stories relating a common history between animals and humans and as an attempt to highlight the untenable project of maintaining an anthropocentric worldview.

Learning beyond classrooms is becoming more common in formal and non-formal education internationally. Research on outdoor learning and education has focussed on barriers, outcomes, and equity rather than processes or teachers' practice. Despite claims around the importance of natural and outdoor places in education, the ways in which teachers consider and use particular places in preparing for and teaching outdoors is not well understood. Despite calls to do so, non-anthropocentric, posthumanist, and new materialist place theories remain under-utilised in empirical research in this area. Notably, there are only a handful of studies that include any reference to teachers' views or practices with respect to the role of more-than-human elements. The aim of this thesis was to find out from teachers themselves when and how more-than-human elements became harnessed into the planning and enactment of curricula for outdoor learning. A multicase study was employed to inquire into the practice of five in-service school teachers based on place-responsive methods, namely, walking interviews and memory-box interviews. Drawing on postqualitative orientations to analysis, Deleuzoguattarian inspired vignettes produced four findings. In different ways, these teachers' practice emerged through (1) their ability to notice the more-than-human, (2) attending to how their learners noticed and responded to the more-than-human in educational experiences, (3) seeking to become more attuned to the places visited, and (4) supporting the assembling of material, discursive, human, and more-than-human elements together in curriculum making. Implications for teacher education and in-service practice that encourage consideration of the more-than-human in educational practice are signposted. The thesis' contribution provokes new considerations of how outdoor educational provision can be re-oriented to include more-than-human elements. These contributions may be significant in supporting education that could improve human environment relations and address environmental concerns.

This thesis investigates the multiple readings that arise when the division between the biological and technological is interrupted--here abjection is key because the 
binary between abjection and gadgetry gives multiple meanings to other binaries, including male/female. Using David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and eXistenZ, I argue that multiple readings arise because of people’s participation with electronically mediated technology. Indeed, abjection is salient because Cronenberg’s films present an ambivalent relationship between people and technology; this relationship is often an uneasy one because technology changes people on both a somatic and cognitive level.

<p>Nanotechnology plays an important role in today’s society because it allows convergence to the nanoscale, that is to say to the level of atoms and molecules, as part of a miniaturization trend; and also because it is being used for improving human performance or enhancement. Nanotechnology will have a tremendous impact thanks to its potentialities, and the human desire for enhancement - and for some even the desire to reach a posthuman stage. Since nanotechnology-based human applications – cyborgs and implants – might represent a threat to what defines us as humans, namely our human nature, a different approach on the distinction between therapy and enhancement is needed in order to handle those applications in a wiser and more responsible way. This thesis will work on such approach.</p>

Nanotechnology plays an important role in today’s society because it allows convergence to the nanoscale, that is to say to the level of atoms and molecules, as part of a miniaturization trend; and also because it is being used for improving human performance or enhancement. Nanotechnology will have a tremendous impact thanks to its potentialities, and the human desire for enhancement - and for some even the desire to reach a posthuman stage. Since nanotechnology-based human applications – cyborgs and implants – might represent a threat to what defines us as humans, namely our human nature, a different approach on the distinction between therapy and enhancement is needed in order to handle those applications in a wiser and more responsible way. This thesis will work on such approach.

Abstract: This thesis aims to explore how utopian desires re/shape the posthuman, cyberspace and histories by means of information technologies in William Gibson¡¦s Idoru and All Tomorrow¡¦s Parties, which construct a fragmented but subversive power by representing the world in a utopian text that allows the free play of ideology. Gibson uses utopian imagination to cobble together a near future that reflects his concern with information technologies and media over contemporary society. Utopian imaginations on the one hand open up possibilities and transform fixed ideas; on the other, utopian imaginations are easily turned into utopian desires that are subject to manipulation if utopian designers want to sell. I intend to discover how desires to realize a utopia (body, space, and history), which is the ultimate goal of utopian program, are being manipulated by utopian designers. I will mainly adapt and blend Katherine Hayles¡¦s notion of the posthuman perspectives to challenge human possibilities, Donna Haraway¡¦s notion of the cyborg as a blasphemy to Western traditions, Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus to examine utopic expressions in William Gibson¡¦s textual constructions of utopias, and Walter Benjamin¡¦s notions of material historiography and history¡¦s messianic power in tracing individual memories under a capitalist contextualized History. In Chapter One, I will argue that Idoru as well as Idoru metamorphosize from a dialectical structure into an informational pattern-random structure, from a commodity into a posthuman subjectivity. I will adopt Katherine Hayles¡¦s concept of information narratives in explaining the re/shaping of Rei¡¦s body and her concept of the posthuman to explicate the struggle between the posthuman and the transhuman. In Chapter Two I will argue that cyberspace serves as a utopia that brings forth the desire to transcend the flesh. This utopian desire is a transgressive discourse that breaks up the totality of a closed system. Moreover, cyberspace exposes the feedback looping of the discourses of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Respectively, by the representation of virtual Venice and the Walled City, these two utopias write proposals that project discourses of pleasure and criticism for achieving their programs. I will adopt Donna Haraway¡¦s cyborg ontology in explaining cyberspace as a transgressive discourse and Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus of utopic expressions and the limits of utopia. Next, in Chapter Three, I shall expose how Harwood the capitalist manipulates the world to fit into his utopian proposal: modernization of the city as a manifestation of a utopia by means of cyberspace as a network that connects people globally. To contravene Harwood, Idoru, Laney and the Walled City denizens collaborate to checkmate Harwood¡¦s king. I will elaborate on the interactions between the universal history and the individual histories based on Walter Benjamin¡¦s concept of history.

This project uses the body as a framework to understand and re-imagine the archives (here referring to the professionally managed repository). It argues that the archives as a body of knowledge, like the human body, does not and cannot fit into normative stable categories. Tracing the shift in archival paradigms from modern to postmodern, I employ the posthuman to argue for a concomitant shift in understanding of the archival body, which I conceive of as comprising both human and non-human corpora of knowledge and knowledge-making practices. These corpora are simultaneously becoming and unbecoming as multiply-situated identities, technologies, representations, and timescapes. Using temporality as a key element in analyzing archival productions, I consider how this body might sediment. This research, written from my insider perspective as an archivist, implements a transdisciplinary approach that draws from the disciplines of archival and queer studies as well as from somatechnics, embodiment and affect studies, and decolonizing methodologies to advocate for a proposed Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, that is designed to trouble the concepts of archival theory and production. It also employed on-site observation and interviews at the Transgender Archives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, observation and narrative analysis of recordings held by the Arizona Queer Archives and the Arizona LGBTQ Storytelling Project, and online interviews with the developer of the Skeivt Arkiv, Norway's first state-sanctioned queer archives. Three overarching questions guided the research: 1) How can archives simultaneously hold normative and non-normative stories, materials and practices together as both complementary and also contradictory without subordinating or otherwise invalidating either and so that each can still be considered worthy of archival attention? 2) How might a Q/M be a radical intervention into normative archival practices and structures and to what ends? 3) What might it mean and look like for a queer/ed archives to be a radically open space? For whom? As we encounter multiply-situated subjects in the postmodern approach and follow traces in order to interrogate the force and function of respectability politics within the archival body, the modern and anthropocentric Cartesian statement 'Je pense, donc je suis' (I think, therefore I am) can no longer support the human and records as the central theme of archival endeavors. The posthuman approach offers many possibilities. Through the understanding that human bodies are relational and contingent in complex ways to non-human bodies and each to bodies of knowledges, human and non-human bodies come together in complex relations and assemblages within the archives. Archival productions can thus represent new and emerging thoughts on lived experiences as these are situated in various structures and systems. The Q/M offers a way of thinking and acting with, about, through, among, and at times in spite of traditional as well as emerging archival practices and processes in order to facilitate new, imaginative, irrational, and unpredictable re-configurations of bodies and archives and the many histories and records therein. Its flexible foundation in the theories employed in the research support Q/M's seven key approaches: 1) Participatory Ethos, 2) Connectivity, 3) Storytelling, 4) Intervention, 5) Re-framing, 6) Re-imagining, and 7) Flexibility & Dynamism.

This thesis examines the theme of robot rebellion in SF narrative as an incarnation of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. Chapter one analyzes the depiction of robot rebellion in Karel Capek’s R.U.R. Chapter two surveys posthuman theory and offers close readings of two contemporary SF television series that exemplify ontologically progressive narratives. The thesis concludes that posthuman subjectivity sublates the Master/Slave dialectic and encourages practical posthuman ethics.