This thesis provides a comprehensive critical analysis of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, ten science fiction (SF) texts concerned with the Culture, Banks’s vision of his “personal utopia”: Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), The State of the Art (1991), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). I place this series within the context of the space opera sub-genre, and – drawing upon a critical toolkit developed by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008) – I explore the extent to which Banks achieved his goal of reshaping the sub-genre for the political Left. Due to the complexity and ambiguity of Banks’s creation, this research addresses the central question: what is the Culture? I argue that the Culture constitutes a utopian variation of Csicsery- Ronay’s technologiade, challenging the notion that Banks’s creation represents an empire or imperialist project. I consider the Culture as a culture: peoples linked by a shared value system and way of life; a method of development and nurturing; a system of utopian processes. Drawing on Archaeologies of the Future (2005), I argue that the Culture series demonstrates Frederic Jameson’s notion of ‘thinking the break’, with Banks’s writing constantly affirming the possibility and desirability of radical sociopolitical change. I identify six key radical moves away from the nonutopian present – characterised as shifts, breaks or apocalypses – which form the Culture’s utopianprocesses, with each chapter exploring the extent to which the Culture has overcome a fundamental obstacle impeding the path to utopia. The Culture has moved beyond material scarcity, alienated labour, capitalism, and the class-system, maintaining State functions. Culture citizens are notable for significantly adapting their own bodies and minds – controlling senescence and ultimately death itself – but motivated by the desire to improve rather than transcend their humanity. The Culture has achieved a form of equality between the sexes and removed patriarchy, yet is still coping with the implications of sex and gender fluidity. Despite relying upon seemingly quasi-religious innovations, the Culture is entirely secular, having moved beyond any kind of religious or faith-based worldview. Finally, the Culture is perhaps an example of what Jameson has called ‘the death of art’, as creative and artistic practice seems to have become part of everyday life, which contrasts with the numerous artworks produced on its margins.

As science races to keep up with science fiction, many scientists are beginning to believe that the next step in human evolution will be a combination of human and machine and look a lot like something out of Star Trek. The constant pursuit of perfection is a part of the human condition, but if we begin to stretch beyond the natural human form can we still consider ourselves human? Transhumanism and posthumanism are only theories for now, but they are theories that threaten to permanently displace the human race, possibly pushing it into extinction. This thesis will look at the theories of transhumanism and posthumanism through the lens of science fiction and ask the question of whether or not technology holds the key to humanities next evolutionary step or its demise.

Antiracism consistently decries its lack of transformative effects, particularly in relation to embodied experiences of racism and the complexity of racist processes and experiences (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Hage, 2016). By contrast, cyborgian theory (Gray, 1996; Haraway, 1991) highlights the cyborg as a powerful resource for an embodied transformative politics that is responsive to the structures and processes of embodied understandings, and to the entanglements of knowledge and being. This thesis theorizes how the cyborg may be operationalized for antiracism specifically. I reconfigure antiracism considering the cyborg through three steps. First, building on my own embodied experience as a white, cisgendered woman, I ground antiracism in a praxis of embodied response-ability (Haraway, 2016) moving from a reactive form of antiracism to an on-going project of engagement. Second, I draw on posthumanist anti-oppressive and feminist theory (e.g., Braidotti, 2011; Thweatt-Bates, 2016) to align antiracism with Donna Haraway’s (1991, 1992, 2016) conceptualization of the cyborg. This alignment refigures antiracism as actively embodied, theoretically grounded, and attentive to relationality and processes of cultural production. Third, I operationalize my theorizing through my embodied engagement with Canada’s parliamentary precinct, Parliament Hill. My diffractive mapping through an antiracism attuned to the cyborg shows how Parliament Hill produces and continues racism through an assemblage of mechanisms of nationalist dominance that actively fortify overt boundaries, network dialectic understandings of identity, and pattern racist relations of belonging and otherness. My analysis reveals how intimately and insidiously racism lives and entangles in knowledge production. It also shows how engaging the world, recognizing the onto-epistemological orientation in posthuman cyborg provides a means for critically living in and with entanglements of embodied racisms that enable a transformative antiracist praxis.

This dissertation is a performative exploration of experience within our technoscientific--that is, technologically and scientifically saturated--world. Drawing upon posthumanism and cyborg studies and working through specific, mutated versions of performative inquiry and phenomenology, I aim to encourage creative public participation in technoscientific discourse. That is, I apply an adapted method (cyborg phenomenology) to my own staged personae performances of nonhuman entities in order to investigate technoscientific experience from a less anthrocentric perspective. My goal is to interrogate my performance experience in order to better understand the dynamics of agency and relationship within our technologically infused world, and to employ performance and performative writing as pedagogical tools for educating others about these dynamics. This document might be best read as an example of performative inquiry as a useful approach to the study of technoscience and its consequences. As a whole, this dissertation is a call for, theorization with, and performative demonstration of artful participation in the multi-layered discourses of technology and science that impact the lives of all beings in our world. It is an experiential experiment, an exploration of possibility, and a beginning.

This project examines concepts and theories of the posthuman, or posthumanism, in contemporary popular and theoretical texts. The term "natural perversions" is an apparent paradox, but one that can point to some of the contradictions inherent in humanism; its use here suggests some of the profound challenges posthuman theory presents to exploitative institutions and power structures based on human privilege. Natural perversions is an attempt to naturalize, in a sense, the notion of perversion, but also to turn the nonnative language of perversion back onto dominant humanist institutions and discourses, especially anthropocentric visions of economics, evolution, and sexuality. Economics, evolution and sexuality are implicated in reiterating and supporting each other in their humanist and anthropocentric attitudes and assumptions. Interrogating humanist assumptions in these three areas of knowledge is increasingly necessary, this study contends, in the face of current environmental, economic and political crises such as pollution, peak oil and global warming. Despite their privileging of a human subject, economics, evolution and sexuality can each be considered inhuman systems from a certain point of view, systems that in the words of Elizabeth Grosz "function beyond or above the control of their participants." This project works to problematize human ideals such as reason and rationality, interrogating whether humans can indeed be distinguished from other beings by their rationality and contending that both man-made and natural economies (such as evolution and sexuality) do not function as rationalized and efficient systems in the ways that human thought has generally envisioned. Humans frequently do not behave in their own rational self interest, a foundational assumption of economic theory. The critical theory and popular texts considered here suggest that exuberant, decadent, luxurious, wasteful, and chaotic systems and economies and natural systems may be paradoxically more productive than highly rationalized ones. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka relationen mellan bilen och bilentusiasten, hur samspelet där de båda agerar som aktörer ser ut och varför. För att besvara detta utgår studien från två teoretiska ramverk som kopplas ihop där den ena är karisma och den andra är aktör-nätverksteori. Etnografin är inhämtad genom traditionella etnologiska medel, intervjuer med informanter samt deltagande observationer i fältet. Resultatet från att kombinera och applicera dessa två teoretiska ramverk är att människan aktivt förändrar och formar bilar i syfte att bygga sociala relationer med andra människor, öka sin egen mobilitet och att uppnå en form utav självuppfyllelse, såsom adrenalin, nostalgi eller erkännande. Bilen i sin tur blir en icke-mänsklig aktör i denna relation, blir både föremål för den affektiva känslan människan jagar efter och upprätthåller ett nätverk och expanderar det genom den kunskap den generar.

Att knyta nya vänskapsrelationer som vuxen kan vara utmanande. Dels för att möjligheternaför sociala interaktioner förändras genom livet men även för att relationer mellan vuxnaställer högre krav. Nu har appar som Gofrendly trätt in i bilden som en potentiell lösning fördessa utmaningar. Gofrendly är appen för kvinnor som vill ha ut mer av sitt sociala liv ochträffa nya vänner. Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka hur vänskapsappen Gofrendly kan användas för attskapa och främja kvinnliga relationer, för att skapa en förståelse för hur normer inom appenkan påverka hur användarna knyter nya vänskapsrelationer. Materialet har samlats in genomnetnografi som metod, där observationer på appen har genomförts samt intervjuer genomappens chattfunktion. Materialet har vidare analyserats genom posthumanistisk teori samtBourdieus teori om habitus. Begreppet rum har använts för att avgränsa appen och visa på hurGofrendly fungerar som en social arena som skiljer sig, men samtidigt samverkar medvärlden utanför. Genom den posthumanistiska teorin kan vi se på appens funktioner somspelregler som användarna måste förhålla sig till, och utifrån de spelreglerna har jag tittat påhur användarna orienterar sig i appen och därmed visar sitt habitus. Genom att studeraGofrendly som ett rum med egna spelregler samt titta på appen genom de valda teorierna, harjag sett hur användarna agerar utifrån de ramar som Gofrendly byggt upp. Det blir äventydligt hur användarna blir påverkade av appen på samma sätt som användarna påverkar den

Philosophy of technology (PoT) analyzes the nature of technology, its significance and consequences, and its mediation of human experiences of the world. Classical philosophers of technology describe mechanization as alienating: Technology causes humans to lose their connection with the natural world. Tehno-rationality replaces critical engagement and creativity. Failing to comprehend the essence/nature of Technology, and its consequences, portends disastrous social, political, and economic consequences. Such perspectives, however, neglect individual experiences of technologies. Filling that lacuna, contemporary philosophers of technology challenge the sweeping determinism of their intellectual forerunners and investigate how specific technologies mediate particular human experiences. Their descriptive prowess, however, lacks the normative engagement of classical PoT, and they emphasize micro effects of technologies to the detriment of macro implications. This dissertation describes an 'un-disciplined' philosophy of technology (UPoT) that unites the macro and micro perspectives by providing narratives of human-technology symbiosis and co-development. Un-disciplined philosophers of technology present posthuman and transhuman perspectives that emphasize the symbiotic relationships between humans and technology. Thus, they deny disciplined philosophy's first critical maneuver: define and demarcate. UPoT enables conversations and debate regarding the ontological and moral consequences of imagining humans and technologies as hybrid, co-dependent things. UPoT builds upon environmental and animal rights movements, and postphenomenology, to emphasize pluralist accounts that emphasize the dynamism of human-technology relations. UPoT argues we should imagine technologies as extensions/parts of living things: they do the shaping and are shaped in turn. I argue that such thinking reinforces the habit, already proposed by contemporary PoT, that emerging human-technology relations demand active interpretation and engagement because the relationships constantly change. Thus, we need to imagine a moral theory that best matches the hybrid/connected condition of the present century. Increasing automation in agriculture and surgery, for instance, exemplify technologies mediating human experiences of food and health, thus affecting how we understand and define these categories. / Ph. D.

The aim of the study is to explore how school absenteeism as a material-discursive phenomenon is produced in the practices of humans and nonhumans, when absences and presences are registered and managed through digital technologies. How is the phenomenon of school absenteeism produced when absences and presences are digitally registered? How does the phenomenon of school absenteeism emerge when both human and nonhuman entanglements are included in the apparatuses of knowing? Through a posthumanist approach, the study engages empirically with two types of software for the registration of absences and presences at three Swedish schools. The results show that digital registration blurs the division between absences and presences, and queers what is absent and what is present. Digital registration produces school absenteeism as a phenomenon for all students every day, and at the same time as mainly for the students who are present most of the time. A conclusion that is drawn from the study is that digital registration makes absences present, by the visualization and performative repetition of the registration. The study points to how school absenteeism is always ‘in the making’, and proposes the concept of school absenteeing as a productive way to open up new possibilities in relation to students’ absences. / Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur skolfrånvaro som materiellt-diskursivt fenomen produceras i mänskliga/icke-mänskliga praktiker, när frånvaro och närvaro hanteras och registreras med hjälp av digitala system. Hur produceras fenomenet skolfrånvaro när elevers frånvaro och närvaro registreras digitalt? Hur framträder fenomenet skolfrånvaro när människor såväl som icke-människor inkluderas i kunskapsproduktionen? I studien skapas empiriska engagemang tillsammans med två digitala system för registrering av frånvaro och närvaro på tre svenska skolor. Genom ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv visar studien att den digitala registreringen suddar ut gränserna mellan frånvaro och närvaro. I sammanvävningar med digitala system blir fenomenet skolfrånvaro mer komplext, eftersom den digitala registreringen producerar skolfrånvaro som ett fenomen för alla elever, varje dag. Samtidigt reducerar den digitala registreringen skolfrånvarons komplexitet och skapar ett fenomen för de elever som för det mesta är närvarande. En slutsats från studien är att registreringen gör vad som är osynligt – det frånvarande – synligt. Studien pekar på hur skolfrånvaro alltid är ett görande och introducerar begreppet school absenteeing [skolfrånvarogöra]. Detta begrepp möjliggör en förståelse av skolfrånvaro som en pågående produktion i mänskliga/icke-mänskliga relationer, snarare än något som elever har eller är och öppnar upp för nya sätt att engagera sig i den alltid närvarande frånvaron.

Detta kandidatarbete handlar om hur ämnen som parodi, posthumanism och mytologi kan kombineras för att skapa en spelprototyp där dessa tre agerar som pelare, vare sig dessa manifesteras inom narrativet, estetiken eller mekaniken. Med hjälp av parodi som designperspektiv kan man granska ämnen som mytologi och posthumanism, för att skapa något som länkar samman dem. Denna text går igenom alla projektets utvecklingsfaser, hur själva arbetsprocessen har utvecklats och olika iterationer vi skapade för att ge en klar bild vilka tankebanor det var som ledde till vilka kreativa val och hur slutprototypen kom till. Synopsis: 300 år efter mänsklighetens förfall, världen är bebodd av monster, men en dag släpps de rastlösa själarna av mänskligheten lös, tar över monstren och gör dem mer mänskliga. / This bachelor thesis will cover how the subjects of parody, posthumanism and mythology can be combined to create a game prototype where these three serve as pillars, whether they take the form of design perspective, esthetics or mechanics. By using parody as a design perspective, one can examine subjects such as mythology and posthumanism in order to create something that connects them. This thesis will go through all the stages of development, how the working procedure has evolved and different iterations we created in order to give a clear image of which lines of thought it was that led to which creative choices and how it led to the creation of the final prototype.  Synopsis: 300 years after the fall of mankind, the world is inhabited by monsters, but one day the restless souls of humanity are unleashed, possess the monsters and make them more human.