The subject of this case study is the Vermont Agricultural Resilience in a Changing Climate initiative, a transdisciplinary research team at UVM that has maintained success in meeting research and outreach objectives despite collaborating in a way that does not follow any particular ideal-type transdisciplinary process. In following recent science and technology (STS) studies' accounts of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the hypothesis pursued is that the transdisciplinary study of messy or "wicked" problems like climate change brings forth an array of responses from researchers whose disciplinary backgrounds already position them to pursue their research differently, particularly when they involve outside stakeholders in a participatory action research agenda. When not addressed explicitly through the transdisciplinary research framework, these differences are likely to result in more subterranean or affective responses, such as ambivalence and equivocation, which may permeate the collaborative group process. Through a qualitative ethnographic approach, I show that transdisciplinary work is complex and situational, due to the topic itself in agricultural resilience and climate change, the affective nature of the collaborative process, the differences in disciplinary perspectives, the researchers' subjectivities, and the influence of outside actors in the initiative. I argue that transdisciplinary work must necessarily be challenging given the variety of heterogeneous forces at play, and that deeper attention to the situation elucidates underlying dynamics that are not addressed in the normal research process. This research contributes insights into the literature on transdisciplinary research on messy problems.

My artwork is about the impact of the digital revolution on every aspect of life, such as relationships, war, and self image. I explore this in the creation of sculptures that represent abstracted globes or video game worlds, digital animations concerning the virtual and simulated, and prints as allegories for embodied post-human experience. The visual themes of my work are bitmapped patterns, early computer graphics, and twenty-sided dice.

The aim of this thesis is to provide an argument that enhancement technologies are a form of enablement more significant than their physical effects; rather, that enhancement might be a fundamental element of humanity. This allows a refutation of the standard bioconservative position, that to increase capacity beyond that of a "normal" Homo sapiens necessarily defeats humanity, or at least nebulous aspects of it. I here argue instead that humanity is affirmed, and furthermore that enhancements are in fact inherently good, valuable, and worthwhile pursuits; on the assumption that it is, as critics of enhancements and transhumanism say, inherently good, valuable, and worthy of preservation to be human. I suggest thus that to enhance is the essence of, and the key to, the continuum of humanity. In the introduction, I set out the reasons why this type of research is increasingly necessary, namely that it is important to rationally consider the effects which new enhancement and related technologies will have on our persons and on our society. Secondly, it presents my rationales for taking liberal stances on questions such as the scope and definition of enhancement, the supposed therapy- enhancement divide, and on access to enhancement technology; in order to provide a reasoned base from which to build the core themes of the thesis. It goes on to address a number of the archetypical critical arguments against enhancement, in support of these core themes. Part II of the thesis contains the papers and delivers the main arguments in sequence- firstly, the need for the application of rationality in policymaking and commentary on bioethical concerns, and secondly the importance of considering motivation when attempting to divine the best course of action to regulate beings and technologies that we have not yet experienced, and the manner of which we cannot entirely predict. This is followed by an argument as to whether it is reasonable to treat enhanced or other purported novel beings that could result from these technologies as different from ourselves, and thus warranting such policy considerations. To accomplish this, the thesis delivers a fresh angle on the relationship between Homo sapiens sapiens, the human, and whatever is posited to supersede it, the posthuman. A central theme is the idea that humanity is a "matter of sufficiency"- an end-state for moral status, not a stepping-stone which one can be 'post'. These arguments culminate in a contention that it is enhancement that acts as the unifying factor in our evolution and existence, and that there is therefore unlikely to be any good reason to see beings that follow the humans of today as being different in any significant way. The thesis concludes with an exploration of the progression of these themes, as well as identifying the place of my work amongst the wider academic literature around enhancement and the nature of the human. Finally, the most promising avenues for future research are explored.

A spectre is haunting contemporary technoculture: the spectre of Singularity. Ten years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact is the technological - a project which, in vivid contrast to the systemic failure that seemingly prevails at nearly every other level, continues to charge forward at breakneck speed. Since the late twentieth century, prompted by the all-but-exponential growth of machine intelligence and global information networks, and by the still largely obscure but increasingly profound-seeming implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists alike have postulated an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed in a sudden explosion of technological development. This moment of transcendence, it is supposed, is at most only a few years off; indeed, some say, it may have already begun. The "Singularity" - a term coined in 1986 by the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse - is at present the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, an area in which the longstanding binary distinctions between science and SF, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. As much as the Singularity thesis implies a total reorganization of society and of the self - which posthumanist cultural studies and cyborg theory have already begun mapping - it also poses a daunting existential challenge to the enterprise of SF itself, to the extent that the Singularity imposes what Vinge has described as "an opaque wall across the future," an impenetrable cognitive obstacle beyond which the extrapolative imagination cannot glimpse. For a genre long defined by its efforts to assert, through the narrative technique of extrapolation, a meaningful continuity between present and future, the Singularity presents a thorny problem indeed, demanding both a reevaluation of SF's conception of and orientation toward the future, and a new narrative model capable of grappling with the alien and often paradoxical complexity of the postsingular. This study is an inquiry into the properties and problematics of Singularity across fictional and nonfictional discourses, and as such it operates on two levels. Reading Singularitarian literature against a broadly articulated context of fringe-science and transhumanist movements, consumer culture, political and economic theory, and related areas of contemporary cyber- and technoculture, I examine how the metaphor of Singularity structures and signifies the aspirations and anxieties of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century technocivilization. As a project of literary criticism specifically, the study works to identify and theorize a grouping of texts that is emerging from cyberpunk and postcyberpunk tendencies in contemporary SF, organized around the premises of Singularity and the posthuman, and classifiable primarily in terms of an attempt to mount a response to the formal and conceptual problems Vinge has identified. Primary readings are drawn from a wide-ranging selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technocultural fiction, with emphasis on SF works by Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and William Gibson.

This dissertation theorizes the ramifications of new media forms of narrative on subjectivization by tracing the evolution of the observer through its permutations as second-order observer, witness, director, and narrative agent and demonstrating the various interacting processes involved in the recursive feedback loops between and among, self, world, and story. In this project, I ex-plore novels by contemporary U.S. authors John Barth, Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, as well as two televisual texts, Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse. Drawing from several seemingly disparate theories, I situate my argument in the interstices of systems theory (Luhmann, Clarke), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Butler), media theory (Ellis, Fiske, Buonanno), and posthuman theory (Hayles, Badmington), putting forth a theoretical lens I call posthuman narrative onto-epistemology. The study thus fits into overlapping critical conversations. The extended treatment of five contemporary American novels situates Storied Subjects in conversations surrounding postmodernism and posthumanism as well as conversations surrounding these particular authors. For example, in the first chapter, I argue that the John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 incorporate the observer from systems theory into the narrative frame, catalyzing an ontological and epistemological shift. In the second chapter, I show the ways in which Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Underworld demonstrate what John Ellis calls the “witness” ontology as well as the evolution of that ontology into what I call the “direc-tor” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In addition, the chapter devoted to televisual texts intervenes in an important, though often marginalized, conversation surrounding the importance of situating televisual narratives in dialogue with print fiction, arguing that we must attend to TV texts if we are to understand the texture of contemporary print fiction, which is saturated with the language of TV. In the final chapter, I explore the development of the “narrative agent” ontology, examining both form and content of the televisual texts Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse in order to argue that, once second-order observation reaches a prolonged critical awareness, the observer’s observation runs alongside her or his ability to intervene in the narrative, which allows for changing the story itself.

Popular media, literature, and theory suggests that technology has induced a newly evolved, posthuman and postmodern (or "post-Enlightenment") cyborg consciousness. I suggest, as an alternative reading to the notion that we are evolving towards a disembodied posthuman state which will revolutionise what it means to be human, that the literature of cyborgs incorporates and reinscribes traditional narratives about human identity. This project analyses representative tropes of the cyborg in contemporary discourse from an explicitly historical perspective. Although dualisms such as mind/matter or soul/body are recognised in current theorising of the cyborg, little has been written about the historical relationship of mechanism and humanity in the ongoing discussion of cyborg mind/body ontology. The cyborg in much of our literature throughout a wide range of genres is represented by the exaggerated and horrifying effacement of human embodiment to embellish an underlying concern about the consequences to the human spirit when we can be reproduced by technological means. This thesis argues that much of the discourse about the novelty of the "postmodern" human-machine, however, is not unprecedented. Cyborg literature re-presents themes and concerns regarding the man-machine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and continues to reflect a religious debate about the spirit within the material body. Beginning with current notions of the supposed obsolescence of the body, this thesis explores how the contemporary cyborg functions as a device to reflect traditional (frequently Christian) values. Drawing on eighteenth-century medical philosophy and the satirical literary responses to mechanist definitions of body and soul, I demonstrate literary connections between medical and literary metaphors of the Enlightenment man-machine and the postmodern cyborg in popular media, fiction, and theory. The debate surrounding eighteenth-century materialism, primarily metaphorical and analogical in its representation of the body's mechanisms, contributed directly to current notions of figurative disembodiment and the status of the human soul in contemporary literature. I conclude that the cyborg as a figure of literature does not indicate a revolutionary change in social consciousness but repeatedly is a device used to affirm traditional religious concepts of human reproduction, individual free will, spirit and body, and life after death.

As embodiment riddles the body, this thesis interrogates embodiment as a riddle by foregrounding ethical, epistemological, and ontological questions of what embodiment(s) and bodies might be capable of creating and performing. Articulating local embodiments while also attempting to work through the puzzle of embodiment to playfully illustrate multiple responses to embodiment, this thesis incorporates images and discussion generated with a group of female PeeWee hockey players. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Barad, Kirby, and Grosz, I experiment with articulating tentative, enfleshed, entangled, and emplaced local embodiment(s) through the hockey-bodies of female adolescent athletes. / Graduate

This essay follows closely the process of making the work for my degree project. The aim of the text is to reflect as much as possible the entire journey of my thinking and doing, demonstrating how one of the main concepts of the work, metamorphosis, served the final purpose of the project, to build a world for bizarre creatures made of colorful piles of clothes. The methods used were looking for inspiration material online i.e. a performance by Ingri Fiksdal, several drag performers, or a music video by the band Primus, bringing in Posthuman theory and decolonial thinking as well as readings on the grotesque, including writers like Rosi Braidotti, María Lugones, and Sara Cohen Shabot respectively, taking an excessive amount of notes on diary form, and playing dress-up in the studio. The information that surfaced while all the above was combined, is presented in quite a raw form here, not as one smooth text, but as chunks that mirror where my process was at each moment. More so than anything else, this essay demonstrates the messiness of a/my artistic process and acts as a mind map of interests as they get closer to some kind of crystallization. / <p>This master work includes both a performing and a written part.</p>

This Thesis is pertinent to the negotiations of sex, gender, and sexuality in the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and the narratives the gamer traverses while on the game, and aimed to add to the literature regarding the entanglements of gender and technology within the virtual world of the video games.This Thesis focused on investigating the potential of technocultural assemblages to undo gender (and racial) interpellations, and more specifically in regard to the assemblages that are formed between (post)human and avatar in first-person video games that allow the user to create their character with a great deal of freedom. In other words, this study deploying the method of Autoethnography set out to research the materialities and normativities in (post)human-technology relations and the potential of these relations to operate as a means of resistance.

Studies of Frankenstein-related cultural, literary, and filmic productions tend to either focus atomistically on a particular cultural artifact or construct rather strict chains of filiation between multiple artifacts. Media scholars have developed rich conceptual resources for describing cross-media appropriations in the realm of fandom (including fan fiction and slash fiction); however, many scholars of digital literary culture tend to describe the relationships between new media artifacts and their print counterparts in terms that promote what is "new" about these media forms without attending to how older media forms anticipate and enter into conversation with electronic multimedia formats. This paper suggests an alternative to this model that emphasizes the extent to which media forms remix, appropriate, and speak through other media and cultural artifacts. Studying Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, James Whale's classic Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein films, Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and some of the scholarly literature around the Frankenstein narrative, the construction of gender, and the discourse of post- humanity, this paper explores the mechanisms through which these artifacts draw attention to their participation in a greater "body" of Frankenstein culture. Additionally, this paper explores how these artifacts use what Bolter and Grusin have described as the logic of hypermediacy to emphasize the specificity of their deployment through a particular medium into a specific historical situation. / Master of Arts