I denna uppsats utforskar vi icke-mänskliga varelser och den mänsklighet vi som betraktare ger dem, både i position som mediekonsumenter samt producenter. Med en frågeställning som fokuserar på hur vi ska gestalta varelser i relation till antropomorfism, och genom granskning av den vaga gräns som existerar mellan fantasivarelser och verkliga djur, tar vi hjälp av teorier främst från Donna Haraway, Boria Sax, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck och Fanny Ambjörnsson. Ändamålet består i att belysa antropomorfiska stilgrepp, om hur och varför vi applicerar beteenden som antas styras av motiv liknande människans på djur, samt att öka förståelsen för den mänskliga linsens inblandning. Genom tidigare forskning, tecken- och färglära, samt en ständig medvetenhet kring posthumanism och mänskliggörande av djur, tar vi oss an att gestalta nyanserad antropomorfism i 3D. I vår undersökning framkommer det att ett kontinuerligt reflekterande krävs vid tillskrivande av attribut på varelser, eftersom vi ständigt tolkar omvärlden genom en mänsklig lins. Argument finns för att de varierade förutsättningarna olika djur är försedda med ger upphov till en helt annan iakttagelseförmåga än den människan besitter. Det behövs både ett kritiserande av människans natur och ett ifrågasättande av att som människa försöka uppfatta världen genom en icke-mänsklig varelses sinnen, när vad vi besitter är ett utifrånperspektiv till djurlivet. / In this bachelor thesis, we investigate non-human beings and the human traits we apply on them, both in a position as media consumers and as producers. The research question focuses on how to portray creatures in relation to anthropomorphism, and with an examination on the vague boundary that exists between imaginary animals and real animals, we explore anthropomorphism mainly through the theoretical lenses of Donna Haraway, Boria Sax, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and Fanny Ambjörnsson. Our purpose is to illuminate the idea of anthropomorphism – how and why we apply human-like behaviours on animals – and to increase our understanding for the influence of the human lens. With previous research, semiotics, as well as an awareness about posthumanism and humanizing of animals, we come to terms with the depiction of nuanced anthropomorphism in 3D. Through our research it appears that we need to reflect constantly on our choices during application of attributes on creatures, due to our human interpretation of the world. There is discussion concerning the varying qualities among different kinds of animals, which declares that these attributes cause animals to possess a completely different perception than humans hold. It requires both a questioning about the nature of humans, and a criticizing of how we humans try to apprehend the surrounding world through the lens of a non-human creatures and their senses, when all we have is an outside perspective of the wildlife.

The artistic research, Kehrä/ Kehrae is done together with Myrsky Rönkä, with significant ropes, places and spaces, creatures and histories. This paper is subtitled entwining possible worlds. It implies alternative possibilities for prevailing modern western ways to live and die and circus. There are three big questions in the air: What is the meaning of circus? What does it mean to be alive? And how could circus care (the existence of life within the earth)? The starting point was a concern about the troubling state of life and the world how it is today and how the modern western circus felt paradoxical and incapable of responding to the current times in sustainable ways. The initial question was, how to combine circus and other aspects of life into one sustainable, or regenerative and renewable practice. In order to seek other, latent realities this research goes beyond modern western circus history, beyond modern western worldview, and beyond “ordinary” circus practice.  The guiding idea is: life is circus, circus is life. Therefore the practice in this research is a collection of “whatever we were doing”. To mention some with great importance: whirling, meditation, becoming-with rope, making and mapping space with ropes and strings, dwelling with nature, and sauna. The other idea is to go through liminality and evoke communitas, with circus practice, bodies, ropes, and others.  This means abandoning accustomed ways to train and think about circus and life. Because of its nature, this work is also opening up what could spiritual (circus) practice mean as an alternative to a mechanistic way of thinking and making. The ontology of this research is animistic and relational, which suggests care, respect, reciprocity, and response-ability in all of our relations and takes into account the circulative nature of time and life. Animistic ontology takes materiality and skill towards the idea of becoming-with, when becoming into who and what happens in relational material-semiotic worlding. During the process, some specific features, or dwelling places for circus, emerged. Those are circus and play, circus and liminality, circus and shamanism, circus and others. In these dwelling places lies the deep powers of circus to be inversive and subversive, simultaneously transformative and sustaining: the mythical power of circus. Through the final artistic outcome Kehrä/ Kehrae, this paper is entwining the strings of the research together as a temporary gathering to be unraveled and intertwined into one again.

The tourism industry is both large and growing, with private and public actors investing heavily in the commodification of places to travel to, supporting individuals with the wealth to do so, to be in different places for short time periods. Correspondingly, popular discourses and research within tourism studies have arisen, looking at attitudes and social and environmental impacts drawn along delineations of the tourist and the host and spatially enclosed tourist places or ‘destinations’.  In this thesis, I seek instead to focus on how we might be different in places. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of assemblage and a focus on embodiment, I offer a reflexive account of an onto-epistemological inquiry into becoming with a range of other beings and things that are co-constitutive of the harbour wall or ‘the rocks’ at the Visby marina. Over a 6 month period of participant observation, I seek to be responsive to the emergent properties and knowledge of the fluctuating actors amidst the place assemblage of the rocks. The essay I offer within this thesis is part of what is resulting from these relationships and becomings. Within the essay, one of many themes I take up is a problematic view of place as being filled with objects of matter as opposed to an entangled, relational web of beings and things. Tourism easily commodifies places when they are seen as containers for bodies and objects, and this creates a distinct view of ‘tourist places’. I follow with a call to disrupt the imagined difference between tourist places and places in which we lead our daily lives in the hope of living outside of the shadow of human exceptionalism.  Accordingly, this thesis calls us to re-think tourism as but one part of our lives, as entanglements of bodies and things in and as place.

This essay applies human-animal studies in relation to the Swedish author Kerstin Ekman's books Guds barmhärtighet (1999), Sista Rompan (2002) and Skraplotter (2003) together called Vargskinnstrilogin. Kerstin Ekman's authorship is characterized by a coexistence between human, nature and animals where the stories entangle them into a dense complexity. As a reader, one is constantly reminded of this coexistence through Ekman's narrative approach as her stories contain many contact zones between humans and animals, which creates space for problematizing this entangled coexist from a posthumanistic perspective. The animals in the stories are at different distances to the human being based on their characteristics of being regarded as wild, domesticated or ferral. Based on these three categories, the wolf as a representative of the wild animals is analyzed in a theoretical context focusing on the function of different power structures within the anthropocentric paradigm. Ferral conditions are analyzed on the basis of, among other things, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theories of animal-becomings, escape lines and rhizom where the dog mainly exists when it is embodied in close interaction with humans in Ekman's stories. The domesticated animals are analyzed on the basis of the tension between rural and urban, where the progress of the civil society are rapidly changing during the 20th century which creates changed relations between people and agricultural animals.

This paper explores through Donna Haraway's storytelling practices feminist approaches to collaborative writing. Employing a phenomenological qualitative research approach, the thesis aims to analyze how Haraway herself exercises feminist writing and facilitates the learning of collaborative storytelling. The first research question: How does Haraway practice storytelling while simultaneously situating herself as well as others, is focused on investigating Symbiosis, Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble, a chapter from Haraway's publication Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). Drawing on the qualitative analysis carried out through the process of phenomological re-telling, two case studies are presented. The two publications The Books of the Books, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in association with dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and Critical Zones – The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour building on the exhibition Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics in 2020 are examined in terms of their curatorial and editorial orientations in order to answer the question: How can the position of a curator perform as a multidisciplinary editor without resigning to its own singularity or acting omnisciently? In the proposed practice of a phenomological approach of re-telling, it is referred to Rosi Braidotti's remarks on the nomadic subject, along with feminist modes of (academic) writing, as motivated by scholars such as Mona Livholts and Nina Lykke. The thesis demonstrates that collaborative storytelling and writing directs the emphasis on methods of citation and referencing, just as their various possible layouts. In highlighting these, the paper also reveals the challenges of such writing to produce perceived hegemonic knowledge while not being collaboratively situated.