This thesis seeks to show that contemporary speculative fiction films both present and act as agents for an understanding of the human as increasingly economically rational. This conception of the human focuses on humanist values that project a vision of human exceptionalism into the future. Expanding on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism, this thesis follows its connection to biotechnology and the transhuman subject created through biotechnological intervention, arguing that the films Limitless (2011), Avatar (2009), and District 9 (2009) depict a vision of the human as something that can be calculated and therefore optimized, moving toward the transhuman goal of perfectibility. / Graduate

La figure de l’homme a traversé l’histoire de la représentation, mais les valeurs signifiantes du mondecontemporain ne sont plus compatibles avec les conditions d’une histoire de l’idéal humain classique. Eneffet , face à l’évidence des changements induits par les avancées technologiques, nano et biotechnologiques,numériques, cognitives et génétiques, l’apparition d’une humanité augmentée semble irréversible. Entrel’angoisse d’un avenir profondément détérioré par les assauts d’un ultra libéralisme et le messianisme destechnoprohètes , l’expression d’un corps autre, « posthumain », conjugue émancipation narcissique, recherchescientifique, et hybridation corporelle. Le dispositif posthumain, qui émerge comme une des manifestations de«l’esprit du temps » dominant, peut se comprendre comme une « Vanité contemporaine ». Ce dispositif entenddépasser l’humain, construire un nouvel imaginaire, et chemin faisant, inventer une nouvelle représentationfigurative de l’individu.Dans le champ des arts plastiques, « le dispositif posthumain » donne lieu à de multiples expressionsqui en soulignent les incohérences, et surtout dénoncent certains déterminismes scientifiques. Conscient del’importance de ces enjeux scientifiques, culturels et idéologiques et souhaitant demeurer dans la logiqueinterrogative qui définit le champ des arts plastiques, / In front of the changes inferred by technological breakthroughs, nano and biotechnological, digital,cognitive and genetic, the appearance of a « increased » humanity seems inflexible. Between the anxiety of afuture profoundly damaged by the assaults of ultra liberalism, and the messianism of « technoprohets », theexpression of an other body, « posthuman « , conjugates narcissistic emancipation, scientific research, andphysical hybridization. The figure of the man crossed the history of the representation, but the significantvalues of the contemporary world are not compatible any more with the conditions of a history of the idealclassic human being. The « posthuman plan », which emerges as « spirit of the times », can understand as a« contemporary Vanity ». This device intends to overtake the human being, to build a new imagination, andcertainly to invent a new history of the representation of the individual. In the field of the plastic arts, « theposthuman device » give rise to multiple expressions who underlines the incoherence, and especially denouncescertain scientific determinisms. Aware of the importance of these scientific problems, but wishing to remainin this inquiring logic which defines the field of the plastic arts, I wanted to propose a plastic expression inall these questions. Three attitudes were respected to succeed for confining this question of the representationof the posthuman being. These attitudes could correspond in a kind of declension of the time : the end of thehumanism, the birth of a « increased » humanity, and finally, the appearance of a « posthuman being ».

Today, ecology-oriented thinking is increasing in people’s minds. However, urbanisation, with its accompanying character of environmental depletion, impacts on society, ecology, and economy. It makes me think about where places in nature are situated in our everyday lives. What is nature in our lives? In our mind now, how do we think about nature? My project, How Plants Think is to address the question how city inhabitants can begin to recognise a new way of looking at plants, the human relationship to nature in everyday life in the urban domestic space. This thesis examines the design field in the context of sustainability on the environmental and societal aspects. Observing relationships between humans and plants makes a different design perspective from emotion and design to posthumanism and design that enables designers to engage with complex issues. The resulting project displays a space where people to rethink about human-plant relationships, as well as the meaning of we, humans and nature, are tangled. It is not so much about design does itself, itis about what it can show us about what it has not been done.

Ghost, Animal, Android: Trauma, Posthuman Ethics, and Radical Vulnerability in American Literature, 1940-2010 The dissertation argues that the literary topoi of the ghost, animal, and android function as ethical categories offering access to traces of trauma that operate beyond the boundaries of the human. The study revises the traditional argument that the literatures of trauma work to heal the victims of personal and cultural catastrophes by emphasizing work by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, William Heyen, and Philip K. Dick that resists an oversimplified notion of healing and instead experiments with nonhuman models of subjectivity as means through which to manage open wounds. Able to register traumatic events at the very edge of understanding, canonical and popular depictions of the ghost, animal, and android disturb readers into an ethics of radical vulnerability, encouraging them to cross subjective and cultural thresholds and become vulnerable to the present but elusive pain of others.

This paper is exploring Donna Haraways cyborg theory, in a perspective of Library- and Information Science. The investigation aims to better understand the occupation of librarians, and their position within knowledge creation through a digital and cyber technologically evolving society. The cyborg figuration, is making it possible to look at the librarian’s occupation in a postmodern-, posthuman-, and cyberfeminist perspective. The cyborg figure is a posthuman figure, a fusion between human and technology. Because of its interdisciplinary composition, the cyborg is cross-bordering and diversified in its nature. In a combination with Library- and Information Science the cyborg theory can produce new perspectives on our knowledge production.       The empirical investigation is made within the context of academic library research support, and Open Science. Throughout this development it becomes clear that the librarian is working in a coexistence between human and technology. This paper then demonstrates, that there is an analogy between the librarian and the cyborg figure, and especially in the context of the academic library. In this analogy, the cyborg librarian is constituted as a central phenomenon in a line of several developmental events – concerning the accessibility and dissemination of scientific knowledge creation, through the digital environment.       The cyborg librarian is then able to use the cyborg theory in this context, to cross over borders and create new perspectives. It can also create pedagogic tools for information instructions, that contribute to a deeper and more complex insight in knowledge production, as reality production. By evolving a critical, multimodal and reflective information literacy, and thereby also supporting the library institution in adopting to a postmodern society. Haraways cyborg feminism is also applying a perspective of social justice into the context of literacy instructions, whilst working in the same spirit as the democratic mission of the library institution.

Inledning Detta examensarbete är en undersökning om vilken inställning förskollärare har till att använda återbruksmaterial i förskolan, vilket lärande förskollärarna menar sker och hur förskollärare arbetar med återbruksmaterial tillsammans med barnen. Återbruksmaterial kan ses som en del i hållbar utveckling där barnen får möjlighet att lära sig ta tillvara på material istället för att slänga det. Studien görs för att ge ökad kunskap om användningen av återbruksmaterial, samt inspirera förskollärare till att se möjligheter med återbruksmaterial. Syfte Syftet är att skapa kunskap om förskollärares arbetssätt med återbruksmaterial och hur det synliggörs i den dagliga verksamheten. Metod Utifrån studiens syfte används kvalitativ intervju som metod för att få en inblick i förskollärarnas erfarenheter, tankar och arbetssätt med återbruksmaterial. Studien innefattar sex olika intervjuer i två olika kommuner. Under intervjuerna användes ljudupptagning som verktyg, materialet transkriberas för att användas vid analysen. Resultat Resultatet i studien visar förskollärarnas grundinställning till att använda återbruksmaterial i förskolan. Under förskollärarnas grundinställning lyfts förhållningssättet till materialet, lika möjligheter för barnen oavsett ålder och kön, risker med materialet och återbruksmaterialets påverkan på makt och konflikter i barngruppen. Förskollärarna anser att det sker ett lärande för barnen med återbruksmaterial som verktyg och att barnen lär genom kropp och sinne. Barnen lär sig samarbete, matematik samt språk och kommunikation genom att använda återbruksmaterial. Det framkommer i resultatet hur förskollärarna tar tillvara på återbruksmaterial i utformandet av miljön genom att ha en tanke på hur materialet presenteras och att ha ett varierat material. Förskollärarna lyfter olika arbetssätt med återbruksmaterial i förskolan. De tar in materialet i temaarbetet och materialet kan kompletteras med naturmaterial eller färdiga leksaker.

This master thesis deals with the topic of the relationship between man and technology, which is represented by cyborg characters in visual culture. The aim is to create a stereotype of individual cyborg characters from selected cyber-punk works, on the basis of which I can reflect the vision and ideas of the relationship between the organic and technical in the future world. This work is divided into four chapters - the first chapter focuses on cyber-punk as a sub-genre of sci-fi, in the second I define the cyborg character and the postmodern theoretical background, which are related to the cyborg, in the third chapter I present the theoretical basis for the analysis of characters and specify methodological procedures, in the final chapter I analyze the individual works.

This dissertation argues that the unstable category of the parasite was used to debate the limits of humanism during the modernist period (approximately 1890 to 1945). I show how the most marginalized individuals and organisms are deemed “parasitic” and positioned at the core of social issues, such as tropical disease, poverty, and racism. Authors from Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen to John Steinbeck and George Orwell reveal how parasitism occupies a liminal space between categories of sickness/health, human/animal, and production/exploitation. This project contributes to developing debates in modernist studies about the relationship between nature and culture, and it builds on animal studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate that aesthetics shapes our evaluation of various forms of life.

Water World is a water reservoir in the shape of a mountain, with a steel grid body and a shell of shot concrete. It is situated in the national city park Lill-Jansskogen in Stockholm and the emergence of this project is the disrepair of an existing reservoir. Humans, like all things alive, are dependent on water. We survive approximately three days without water. The stored water is the start of civilization, the first of all functions in society we would not cope without in case of collapse. Instead of habitually reshaping nature in accordance with our needs and wishes, this reservoir mimics nature with synthetic means. It questions the idea that we by technical means could create an equilibrium between nature and late capitalist society. Our systems handling water enables modern life. Water World celebrates this function, and life. After construction the man-made surface is exposed to decay and with time the interior structure will stand as a ruin marking the end of the era of globalisation. / Water World är en vattenreservoar inkapslad i ett konstgjort berg, med en stomme av stål och ett yttre av betong. Reservoaren är belägen i Lill-jansskogen i centrala Stockholm, Sveriges enda nationalstadspark. Människan liksom alla levande varelser är beroende av vatten för sin överlevnad. Vi överlever ca tre dagar utan vatten. Det lagrade vattnet är början påcivilisationen, den första av samhällets funktioner vi inte skulle klara oss utan vid en eventuell kollaps. Istället för att vanemässigt forma naturen efter våra behov och önskningar försöker reservoaren efterlikna naturen med syntetiska medel. Den ifrågasätter idén om att vi med teknikens hjälp kan skapa en balans mellan natur och vår senkapitalistiska kultur. De system människan har utvecklat för att lagra vatten möjliggör våra moderna liv. Water World hyllar denna funktion, och livet. När konstruktionen är färdig kommer den av människan formade ytan med tiden förfalla och interiörens struktur lämnas som en ruin att markera slutet av eran av globalisering.

This dissertation examines end-of-world and posthumanist themes in speculative fiction and theory through the concept of “world unmaking.” Reading for world unmaking in three popular U.S. works of speculative fiction — Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), and N. K. Jemisin’s the Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-17) — it explores how varying representations of “the end” are deployed to destabilize normative ideals of the human and the world that undergird conventional notions of the subject under late liberal humanism. While much attention has been paid to world building and how inherent logics cohere within fictional worlds, world unmaking asks how representations of world disorder, instability, and breakdown might hold important insights for narrating and navigating disordered worlds. Contemporary posthumanist critical theorists increasingly vie for speculative practices that disrupt the inherited onto-epistemologies of liberal humanisms and settler colonialisms. In particular, new materialists and speculative realists argue urgent work must be done to expand thought beyond naturalized and neutralized discourses that subtend conventional versions of reality, especially as the pressures of multiple ecological and geopolitical crises bear down unequally upon the lives of both humans and nonhumans on a shared planet Earth. The rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic, eco-catastrophe, and survival narratives in recent decades suggests a growing appetite for speculative imaginings of the end. While some representations of the end of the world serve as an escape from the intersecting crises of the environment, the resurgence of right-wing politics and white supremacy, and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, this dissertation illustrates the importance of attending to speculative imaginings that use the end-of-the-world conceit to destabilize dominant culture and pose more expansive questions about what it means to be human. / Graduate / 2022-04-19