Since September 11, 2001 the U.S. Border Patrol has grown from 9,821 to 20,273 agents, more than doubling in size and in the process becoming the largest federal law enforcement agency in the United States. This dissertation queries the everyday geographies of the agency's practices; the ways that these geographies intersect with and affect circuits and practices of human migration; how the Border Patrol conceptualizes "threat" and maps this onto people and territory they may then police; the environmental conditions that limit or constrain the everyday reach and efficacy of Border Patrol operations in the remote Arizona desert; the discourses, anxieties and everyday conditions of encounter in rural border regions that drive some residents to call for an even greater increase in border policing; and finally, social movements in the City of Tucson, AZ that have sought to combat, resist and undermine immigration policing through the fabric of everyday life. The dissertation draws from two years of fieldwork in southern Arizona and southeast Michigan examining the complex interactions between residents, civil society actors and law enforcement personnel. Research methods included archival research; semi-structured interviews; and ethnographic observation alongside non-governmental organizations, non-status immigrants and at Homeland Security trade events. The research contributes to geographic literatures on security, migration and border policing in the United States, applying posthumanist theory and feminist methodologies to unpack how material conditions of encounter shape state security practice, how this security practice in turn affects people's everyday conditions of social reproduction, and how these everyday conditions of social reproduction may in turn shape or compel social movement practices that contest these outcomes.

While the fiction of J.G. Ballard has been primarily explored through postmodern criticism, his narratives and settings predict major issues concerning the contemporary discourse of posthumanism. His texts explore the escalating economic, social, and ecological crises converging within the material conditions of human urbanization and late capitalism. Nearly all of Ballard’s novels are as much about locations undergoing a crisis as they are about individuals or communities coming to embrace some extended period of human hysteria. His characters in The Drought, Concrete Island, and Super- Cannes, each progress through ecologically and socially alienating surroundings which invigorate them to act against classical humanism’s hegemonic and anthropocentric tendencies. By applying Henri Lefebvre’s spatial concept of “abstract space” to Ballard’s range of urban settings, this thesis investigates how Ballard’s early, middle, and late, novels continually put materiality, humanism, and technological landscapes, through different ecological and geopolitical crises in order to deconstruct a number of cultural and ideological concerns posthumanist studies seek to address.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka och analysera förskollärares beskrivningar av hur återbruksmaterial kan relateras till hållbar utveckling i förskolans praktik utifrån posthumanistiska begrepp. Studiens syfte utgör även studiens frågeställning som är följande; hur kan återbruksmaterial relateras till hållbar utveckling samt analyseras utifrån de posthumanistiska begreppen agens och materialitet med utgångspunkt i förskollärares beskrivningar. Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt är det posthumanistiska perspektivet där människa som materialitet samt icke-mänskliga materialiteter anses vara ömsesidigt beroende av varandra. Ur detta perspektiv är agens något som uppstår materialiteter emellan och de blir i denna bemärkelse påverkande agenter för hållbar utveckling. En kvalitativ forskningsmetod har tillämpats för insamling av data och möjliggjordes genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med yrkesverksamma förskollärare. Resultatet av studien tyder på att arbetet med återbruksmaterial relaterat till hållbar utveckling kan uppfattas stort och komplext samt att det krävs kunskap om materialet och dess påverkan. En slutsats av resultatet är att arbetet med återbruksmaterial kan påverka hållbar utveckling positivt med hjälp av kompetent personal både på förskolorna och på det lokala återanvändningscentret. I relation till den posthumanistiska teorin kan återbruksmaterialet och människan som ömsesidigt beroende materialiteter tillsammans agera som agenter för en hållbar utveckling.

As posthumanist discourse attempts reposition the human as one of many subjects in relation to ecologies and other inhuman agencies, doing away with a Cartesian human exceptionalism is one of the key problems. From Haraway’s naturecultures, positing human culture as one of many, to Colebrook’s discussions of inhuman agencies, what ‘the human’ means to us is the heart of this theoretical field. In this paper I engage with theories within the discourse and posit them against a dialogue with Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, as well as with the ideas of George Bataille on how the human separated herself from other animals and in doing so created what we call Humanity. The aim is to find inhuman agencies and bring to light how they act upon the human, but also how perceiving the inhuman is, as Bataille writes, closed to us. What we find through a process and concept of annihilation of Humanity with the human, brought forth from a reading of the Biologist’s relation to the lighthouse and the tower in the novel, is that even though we may be able to perceive the inhuman, we might be always already anthropocentric in this perception. I suggest a reversal of Haraway’s term; culturenatures, as a way to understand this anthropocentric perception, in that just as our culture is borne from nature, other naturecultures are closed to us.

The tendency within science fiction to satirise and expose dominant political and social structures works in harmony with Agamben's paradigmatic, philosophical system, which seeks to similarly expose the functioning of biopolitical structures in the West. Agamben is known for his controversial statement that the concentration camp has become the paradigm of modern western government. A key aspect or biproduct of this process is the situation of bare life - a state of being excluded from the polis that emerges as a result of the suspended nature of the paradigm of western government. This state is one of political denudation, such that governments may sanction the abuse and even killing of certain groups: a chief historical example is the murder of Jews during the Nazi holocaust. Sf novels, particularly the work of Philip K. Dick offer unique insights into the process that produces bare life, partly by exhibiting its own specific examples: positing the inhuman or post-human, androids and even women as instances of such. This thesis argues that Womankind is perhaps the central and most pervasive case of bare life, given her long-standing historical oppression. Furthermore, the representation of women in sf often exposes and in some cases critiques the patriarchal power structures that have allowed women to inhabit this political state. The philosophy of Deleuze offers the much needed potential to break away from this never-ending system of female oppression that the current paradigm of biopolitics facilitates. His and Guattari's system of becoming and immanence provides a framework for discussing the position of women as, rather than hopeless victims of a stagnant system, one of potential that they term becoming-woman; this process can be manipulated in certain emancipatory directions, freeing women from patriarchal, political practices. The sf figure of the gynoid in particular acts as a zone of indeterminate becoming whose presence in sf popular culture, literature and also in sf video games (e.g. the Mass Effect and Deus Ex series) is a conduit for exploring and imagining alternatives to current modes of being that are not necessarily gendered. I call this process becoming-gynoid, which offers new avenues for exploration in terms of gender and feminist theory both in sf fiction and sf video games.

Animé par les évolutions industrielles et les prouesses scientifiques, technologiques et biologiques, l’homme contemporain semble préparer le terrain de sa métamorphose. Après avoir cherché à contrôler son environnement, il semble désormais vouloir contrôler son être et devenir maître et cause de lui-même. En effet, aujourd’hui plus que jamais l’homme bricole, traite, cultive, modifie son anatomie de toutes les manières possibles, chirurgies esthétiques, interventions génétiques ou encore opérations technologiques. Le corps du XXIe siècle, dont il est question d’analyser les mutations, les causes et les éventuelles conséquences, devient – comme le soulèvent de nombreux artistes contemporains au travers de nouvelles poïétiques – de plus en plus un élément composite, un amalgame de substances, de normes scientifico-culturelles et de manipulations techno-biologiques, il se fait artefact. Ce travail théorique soutenu par une pratique artistique se propose de nous interroger sur la condition humaine contemporaine, inscrite dans un contexte sociétal qui semble être sous la coupe d’un phénomène de scientifisation très marqué. Une condition humaine, menacée par des idéologies post-humanistes souhaitant prendre en main l’évolution et organiser les générations artificiellement. / Led by industrial developments as well as scientific, technological and biological prowess, modern man seems to lay the ground for his metamorphosis. Having sought to gain control over his environment, he now apparently wants to control his own being and become his own master and cause. As a matter of fact, today more than ever, man tinkers with his anatomy, processes it, cultivates and changes it, be it through aesthetic surgery, genetic intervention or technological operations. The 21st century body, that of which the mutations, causes and possible consequences are being analyzed, increasingly becomes – as many contemporary artists have shown through new poietics – a composite element, a hotchpotch of scientific-cultural norms and techno-biological manipulations, it becomes an artefact. This theoretical work, backed by an artistic practice, seeks to raise questions about the contemporary human condition in a societal context that is seemingly dominated by a very strong scientification phenomenon. A human condition threatened by post-humanist ideologies wishing to take evolution into man’s own hands and to artificially organize generations.

The purpose of this new materialist study was to examine the subject performativity of ‘biracial’ individuals in an interview setting in order to disrupt the humanist assumptions of racial identity in psychological research. I also sought to promote critical resistance to subjectification to examine ‘race’ without reifying participants’ raced subjects. Four research questions guided this study: How does the researcher, researched, and interview intra-activity serve to instantiate the biracial subject? Under what material alterations to the interview process do different subjects come to be? Which subjects come to be or fail to come to be in the interview intra-action? How does purposeful entanglement function during the interview process? In this experimental critical qualitative inquiry study, I interviewed five ‘black-white biracial’ undergraduate students three times each while enacting a series of agential cuts within and between each interview. By altering the flow of material during the interviews, I provoked multiple identity instantiations and analyzed the process of subjectification/individuation. Grounded in Barad’s agential realism, and guided by Simondon, Foucault, and Butler my analysis of this data suggests that humanist models of ‘racial’ identity are insufficient, and findings further suggest that a posthumanist and post-qualitative account of ‘biracial’ identity offers more insight into the performativity of ‘raced’ subjects. This research provides a path for psychological identity research to ethically evolve past the linguistic and ontological turns.

This dissertation explores the emergence of the complexity paradigm in our technoscience culture and proposes "scientific fiction" as a genre of cultural studies based on that paradigm. Throughout this dissertation, I use the terms and concepts of complexity theory developed by new science, which revises the reductionism and linearity of classic science. The complexity paradigm signifies a system of all knowledge that conceives the productivity and creativity of the complexity created by interconnective and interactive dynamics among and within systems. As a literary response to the complexity paradigm, scientific fiction emphasizes the productivity and creativity of the complexity, offering the possibility of the human‘s co-evolution with technoscience. These characteristics of scientific fiction help articulate new ontological, ethical, and aesthetic visions for the posthuman. This dissertation ultimately highlights the strong feedback loops of technoscience, literature, and culture, which promote the complexity paradigm. By comparing Pat Cadigan‘s Synners as a scientific fiction novel and William Gibson‘s Neuromancer as a representative postmodern science fiction novel, Chapter II presents the defining characteristics of scientific fiction, reconfiguring humanity in relation to the technoscience environment. Furthermore, analyzing Greg Bear‘s Blood Music, the chapter claims that the human subject is an adaptive, self-organizing, interconnective system. Grounded in such understandings of humanity and subjectivity, the next chapter examines Marge Piercy‘s He, She and It to offer a new ethical perspective, or the complexity ethics, which establishes the interconnective and interactive relationship between the human and the technological as an evolutionary partner. The complexity ethics describes human behaviors and thoughts in our technoscience culture rather than prescribing a moral guideline. Next, in investigating Shelley Jackson‘s Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel that rewrites Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, Chapter IV explores a new aesthetics appreciating the creativity of the complexity produced by interconnective and interactive dynamics. Finally, through the analyses of the scientific fiction novels, this dissertation suggests that scientific fiction is a transdisciplinary field that can offer new cultural visions.

Syftet med denna studie har varit att lyfta fram utklädningskläder som pedagogiskt material i förskolan. Studien är av kvalitativ karaktär och består av fallstudier från tre förskolor med olika pedagogisk inriktning. Genom intervjuer med förskollärare och barn samt observationer av barns lek har vi undersökt vilken funktion olika utklädningskläder kan ha för barn i förskolan. Vi har även undersökt på vilket sätt placering och utbud av utklädningskläder kan påverka barns användande av dem. Med hjälp av ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv och begreppen agens och intra-aktivitet har vi sett hur utklädningskläder fått liv och gjort saker med barnen. Resultatet visar att utklädningskläder kan fungera som en inspirerande och medbestämmande deltagare i barns lek. Vi har även sett hur materialet blivit ett redskap i barns tillblivelseprocesser när de gått in i roller och utforskat olika identiteter. Ett bra utbud av utklädningskläder kännetecknas enligt denna studie av en mångfald av föränderliga kläder i gott skick och rätt storlek. Utöver detta bör materialet förvaras tillgängligt för barnen för att locka, utmana och inspirera till lek.

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of code. Within this framework, actants become fundamentally exchangeable, able to be combined, manipulated, and understood as variations of digital code. Visual culture – and its expression of vernacular posthumanism – thus functions as a reflection on contemporary conceptualizations of the human, a rehearsal of the posthuman, and a staging ground for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Each chapter of this project begins in the field of film studies and then moves out toward a broader analysis of visual culture and nonhumanist theory. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of phenomenology, materialism, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, film and media studies, and visual culture studies. Visual objects analyzed include: the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); the film 300 (2006); the TV series Planet Earth (2006); DNA portraits, the art of Damien Hirst; Body Worlds; human migration maps; and remote surgical machinery.