Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. Posthumanization comprises "those processes by which a society comes to include members other than 'natural' biological human beings who, in one way or another, contribute to the structures, dynamics, or meaning of the society."
Cthulhu is a cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was introduced in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu", published by the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. Considered a Great Old One within the pantheon of Lovecraftian cosmic entities, this creature has since been featured in numerous popular culture references. Lovecraft depicts it as a gigantic entity worshipped by cultists, in the shape of a green octopus, dragon, and a caricature of human form. The Lovecraft-inspired universe, the Cthulhu Mythos, where it exists with its fellow entities, is named after it.
Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology, landscape, limnology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. The nature of the effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss, climate change, biogeography and nocturnality parameters, changes in geomorphology and stratigraphy.
"A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review (US). In it, the concept of the cyborg represents a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine." Haraway writes: "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
Techno-progressivism or tech-progressivism is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments. One of the first mentions of techno-progressivism appeared within extropian jargon in 1999 as the removal of "all political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization".
Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, art practices, methodologies or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. The first use of the term cyberfeminist has been attributed to the art collective VNS Matrix's A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century which was published online in 1991.
Postgenderism is a social, political and cultural movement which arose from the eroding of the cultural, psychological, and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour among others, and has written widely on the history of science as well as philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres.
Karen Michelle Barad is an American feminist theorist and physicist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism.
Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. The concept aims at addressing a variety of questions, including ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity.
Charis Thompson was Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and before that a Professor at Harvard and Berkeley. She was a professor of Gender and Women's Studies in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She was also associate director, and the founding Director, of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley.
Animism is the third studio album by Canadian Inuk musician Tanya Tagaq, released May 27, 2014 on Six Shooter Records. The album won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize on September 22, 2014, and the Juno Award for Aboriginal Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2015. It was also a shortlisted nominee for the Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year, but did not win.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a Chinese American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms.
"The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" is a 1987 essay written by Sandy Stone. Stone's essay is considered to be the founding text of transgender studies in academia, with other critical transgender works emerging after it. The essay examines how transgender women have historically been viewed, studied, and treated by the western medical establishment.
Katherine Ruth King, known as Katie King, is a scholar of women's studies and author. She is professor emerita in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and author of two books: Theory in its Feminist Travels (1994) and Networked Reenactments (2011).
The Capitalocene is a proposed epoch of human and natural history, posed as an alternative to the so-called “Anthropocene” era. The Anthropocene is a geologic era defined by the human species' impact on the Earth, as exemplified by deforestation, mass extinction, and the introduction of manmade waste materials into the environment, but above all by anthropogenic global warming. Scholars of the Capitalocene, in contrast, attribute these changes not to humanity as such, but to the capitalist mode of production and its need for infinite growth, its dependence on fossil fuels, and its compulsion of capitalists to seek profit without regard to “external” or long-term consequences.
