In a prospective post-work society, a select group of citizens participate in a cross-temporal project. As we follow along their journeys, questions arise. How does time move when it is no longer a commodity? What is design in the age of rampant robotics? How do we define creativity? What is wasted potential, and is it possible to be a failure? Most importantly, can fiction teach us anything about reality?

Contemporary scholars seeking to increase Tuber Melanosporum truffle production rely almost exclusively on technological advancements to increase yields, while failing to place the cultivation of truffles, trufficulture, in its historical or local landscape contexts. In this dissertation, I describe how truffle scholars’ conceptualization of trufficulture and landscapes has changed over 150 years in France, while focusing on the French département of Lot. I examine changing relations between humans and nonhumans and how they impact truffle harvests. I analyzed the history of French trufficulture through a close reading of historic truffle manuals, archival research and the classification of remotely sensed images. Shifting from the past to the present, from July 2014-August 2016, I conducted semi-structured survey interviews with working truffle-growers (trufficulteurs) and participant observation at meetings of trufficulteurs, truffle hunts and truffle markets. I utilize actor-network theory (ANT) as both a theory and methodology. Actor-network theory allowed me to follow the impacts made by both humans and nonhumans on trufficulture. I found that truffle harvests in the 1880s dropped by 90%. Highly populated, intensively worked landscapes of viticulture, silvopastoralism and cereal cultivation created conditions suitable to truffles. By the 1870s the phylloxera aphid ravaged grapevines, which made trufficulture an important source of revenue. These advantageous conditions would not last. Post-WWI, yields fell for decades because of an ongoing rural population exodus and consequent agricultural abandonment, which promoted reforestation and closed canopy forests in Lot, France. By the 1960s, French trufficulteurs organized associations to share knowledge and promote local truffle markets to revive production. Trufficulteurs’ utilization of tractors, ‘inoculated’ plants and irrigation systems produced a new form of “modern” trufficulture. State subsidies helped trufficulteurs adopt “modern” practices, in hopes of increasing yields. “Modern” trufficulture has not dramatically increased yields. A few highly-capitalized trufficulteurs dominate production in Lot. Many others practice trufficulture as a hobby. Instead of relying on “modern” technological fixes, my findings suggest that trufficulteurs, farmers and states should reinvigorate extensive polyculture farming practices that maintain open canopy forests, which were beneficial to trufficulture in the past. Actor-network theory allowed me to rethink human and nonhuman relations, and to propose alternatives to “modern” trufficulture.

In this thesis I explore the place of the human in the Anthropocene, and our relationship to the Earth through an analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. As the trilogy depicts an apocalyptic landscape where the Earth has sentience and humanity is divided into three subspecies, this work of speculative fiction lends itself well to be interrogated and examined as an allegory for our current climate crisis. The analysis is anchored in posthumanism and employs a variety of concepts, such as Bruno Latour’s work on agency and deanimation, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and Amitav Ghosh’s work on speculative fiction among others. I argue that The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates that the Earth is an agentive network that can no longer be ignored and contend that the trilogy complicates both anthropocentrism and individualism by depicting amplified versions of human beings, and in doing so highlights the arbitrary boundaries between both nature and society, and human and nonhuman. Thus, The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as a warning call for a future to be avoided at all costs, while concurrently be used to make sense of the incomprehensibility of our contemporary era.

This thesis project explores combining interactive technology and the natural world, through a more-than-human design approach. This project aims to step away from an industry-driven design by valuing plants as equal in the design process. Throughout this report, an overview of the relevant theory and examples are elaborated on. This overview has informed the project in two ways. It formed the foundation of a concept aiming to improve the user’s interconnectedness with nature and it formed the foundation of an evaluation tool developed for aiding designers in design for plants by addressing three design fields: Design for Care, Design for Cohabitation, and Design for Noticing. The concept and the evaluation tool have been developed in parallel and informed each other throughout the project. The final concept contributes to the discussion about addressing more-than-human actors in design. In this case by addressing plant blindness. The evaluation tool contributes to more-than-human design as a tool to evaluate ideas and projects. This project included an extensive analysis of a design collection, workshops regarding the materiality of living plants and assessment of the evaluation tool, an interdisciplinary design approach, and a prototyping phase during which assumptions regarding the concept were tested.

My thesis titled Attributes of corporeality is a continuation of my thinking on the topic of identity. Now I approach identity as a category, not as an identity that belongs to a particular person. I consider the question of how is identity shaped in a postmodern, globalized world and how is it related to corporeality. My answer is based on the reality I know, on the current state of society. However, the intention of my work is above all to express my idea, which is rather a utopian scenario than anything else.

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Based on what body adornment has been throughout history, this project investigates what it might be in the future. The possibilities, forms and methods of body adornment has changed and will continue to change over time, along with our societal and environmental shifts as well as with developments in science and technology. Our bodies are increasingly perceived as malleable objects that we can modify, enhance and improve. I use speculation as a method to explore how the human body may develop and be modified in the future. I envision a world where we have become increasingly intertwined with technologies, where environmental changes and our lifestyle have affected our biology, and where our bodies have continued to be altered based on social norms. Through this project I have become some kind of contemporary Frankenstein scientist, although I am not in a laboratory but in a jewellery workshop. My objects, which I call potential jewellery, or maybe-jewellery, are presented in an installation in the form of a clinical setting. It is a representation of where body adornment meets medical technology, where jewellery meets prostheses and implants. This project does not have any answers or a clear message about what is right or wrong – it is based on a curiosity without having a conclusion in mind. The installation is meant to be a reminder that our bodies are always adorned, modified and in transformation – that we are in an ongoing metamorphosis from one state to another.

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Present Perfect is part intellectual history of the discourse of humanism in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian culture, and part cultural history of the New Man in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, looking primarily at works of Soviet and post-Soviet fantastika (science fiction and fantasy). The study employs a critical posthumanist methodology drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, and his concept of “rewriting” modernity (here transformed into “rewriting humanism”), and the posthumanist theorization of scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Stefan Hebrechter. The first chapter covers the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, the second chapter the post-Stalinist period, and the third the post-Soviet. The first chapter looks at critiques of humanism in the non-fictional works of religious philosophers and writers (Fedorov, Berdiaev, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky), Soviet ideologues and writers (Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gorky), and some writers who fall between the two poles (Blok, Mandelshtam, Lezhnev), and covers texts published between 1906 and 1934. The second chapter deals with the works of the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe series (1961-86) and the figure of the “Progressor” as the New Man. The third chapter looks at novels by three authors: Petrushevskaya’s Nomer Odin (2004), Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), and Sorokin’s Ice trilogy (2002-05). These works attest to the inextricable interpenetration of the posthuman with the human, of posthumanism with humanism, of the post-Soviet with the Soviet. The study demonstrates how humanism and posthumanism function dialectically: in the best-case scenario, they negate one another to come to a more whole understanding of the human; in the worst-case scenario, this dialectic creates an increasingly more exclusive humanism that reserves the title of ideal subject for fewer and fewer. Moreover, Present Perfect argues that the New Man (that “ideal subject”) in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction is best conceptualized as a field of competing discourses, which fall along three lines of development: the animal-man, the machine-man, and the god-man, each with their own critical orientation toward humanism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet context, writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Sorokin employ a critical posthumanism to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the New Man is used as a tool for discursive domination that denies otherness, and on the other, how the New Man can be reconceptualized as a tool for a liberatory ethics that affirms it.

No description available.