Read more
This volume offers an interdisciplinary conversation about several possible futures for the human species. The contributors elaborate on the issues that trouble our very understanding of what it means to be human in the 21st century, expanding on recent scholarly discussions about the posthuman and nonhuman turn.
List of contents
Introduction: Reflections on the (Post)Human Future, Pavlina Radia
Part I: Humanity, Big History, and Politics of Progress, Sarah Winters
Chapter One: Humanity Has a Choice: Our Common Future from a Big History Perspective, Fred Spier
Chapter Two: Investing in Disaster: Technical Progress and the Taboo of Diminishing Returns, David Witzling
Chapter Three: Gender, Religions and the SDGs: A Reflection on Empowering Buddhist Nuns, Manuel Litalien
Part II: Genocidal Fractures: The Eternal Return of the Past, Laurie Kruk
Chapter Four: The Pilgrimage to Auschwitz: Making Meaning in Late in Modernity, Gillian McCann
Chapter Five: From Gas Chambers to 9/11: The Future of Postmemory and Contemporary America's Commodity Grief Culture, Pavlina Radia
Chapter Six: Art, Trauma, and History: A Survivor's Story, Aaron Weiss
Part III: Doctrines Revisited: Rewriting the Margins, Sarah Winters
Chapter Seven: The Shock Doctrine in Apocalyptic Fiction, Christine Bolus-Reichert
Chapter Eight: Guy Vanderhaeghe and the Future of the Marginalized Canadian Male, Laurie Kruk
Part IV: Posthuman Futures, Laurie Kruk
Chapter Nine: Human versus Cyborg Life: Quality versus Quantity, Catherine Jenkins
Chapter Ten: 'Not Born in a Garden': Donna Haraway, Cyborgs, and Posthuman Contemporary Art, Eric Weichel
Part V: Humanity in the Digital Era, Pavlina Radia
Chapter Eleven: Radical Post-Cartesianism, Or the Post-Human Potentials of Artificial Neural Networks in Our Hyperconnected Age, Chris Vitale
Chapter Twelve: Actual Fantasy, Modulation Chains, and Swarms of Thought-Controlled Babel Drones: Art and Digital Ontology in the Posthuman Era, Adam Nash
About the author
Laurie Kruk is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University. She has published The Voice is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (2003) and Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story (2016). She has also published three collections of poetry: Theories of the World (1992), Loving the Alien (2006), My Mother Did Not Tell Stories (2012).
Pavlina Radia is Associate Dean of Arts and Science and Associate Professor in English Studies at Nipissing University. She is also the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences at Nipissing University. She is the author of Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles: "Two 28 Very Serious Ladies" (2016) and Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature (2016). She is also a co-editor of Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts with Ann McCulloch (2012).
Sarah Fiona Winters is Associate Professor in English Studies at Nipissing University. Her research focuses on the representations of evil in postwar children's fantasy and on the relationship of fandom studies to digital pedagogies. She has published articles on C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Margaret Mahy.
Summary
This volume offers an interdisciplinary conversation about several possible futures for the human species. The contributors elaborate on the issues that trouble our very understanding of what it means to be human in the 21st century, expanding on recent scholarly discussions about the posthuman and nonhuman turn.
