Post humanism

The primary objective of the paper is to construe the post-humanist electronic age and its ramifications in terms of religious, biological, social and economic aspects of human society. These effects eventually affect the cultural core of any human society. The rapid rate of transit brought forth by the technological revolutions would leave the world entangled in its electronic chords and the humans disentangled from their emotional selves. The cybernetic organisms-'cyborgs' will infest the world resulting in racial extinction. Technology is intended to enhance human lives in spheres. Gadgets from being facilitators have metamorphosed into cyborgs marking the end of mankind. Growing needs of sedentary lifestyle coupled with contrived innovations of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) scientists like robots and gadgets which could work beyond any human can imagine has resulted in a 'Power Shift'. The humans have started to play second fiddle to robots. Sherry Turkle's Alone Together has documented the effect of technological advancements on human of all section and age group.

Conferencia magistral moderada por Panagiotis Doulos y Paola Paredes Vázquez y dictada el 3 de diciembre de 2021. Complementa y actualiza la visión de pesadilla pos-social y pos-política planteada en la presentación sobre el lado oscuro de la tecnología y de las aproximaciones formales, así como de sus contrapartidas encarnadas en el giro ontológico y el perspectivismo, no menos que en las corrientes principales del movimiento poscolonial.

Se examina particularmente el caso de Marshall Sahlins y de su amplia trayectoria, orientada últimamente hacia un anti-posmodernismo tibio y mudo y hacia el heroico manifiesto de la contra-contrainsurgencia, tras los pasos de David Price. A partir de esta situación se traza un panorama del estado de situación en el plano ideológico y también científico, delineando qué cabe hacer aquí y ahora a propósito de ciencias que se pretenden pos-sociales y pos-humanas y que según todos los indicios pretenden entronizarse como los modelos dominantes.

Un tema que había quedado trunco en la ulterior ronda de pregunta y respuestas recién tendrá su desarrollo exhaustivo en mi último libro sobre teorías antropológicas de tono crítico titulado "Que se vayan todos: Giros críticas en las ciencias sociales y pos-sociales", disponible en borrador en  https://www.academia.edu/64655442/Que_se_vayan_todos_Giros_cr%C3%ADticos_en_las_ciencias_sociales_y_pos_sociales. .

The posthuman vision of a consciousness freed from its corporeal limitations is arguably most clearly articulated in the popular speculative fantasies of Science Fiction, animation and televised media. It is here that the posthuman imaginary is given free reign to explore, problematize and critique the intricate dynamics of our projected cybernetic futures; where the limits of our natural bodies are transcended and our consciousness stands before an infinite field of possibilities.

This paper attempts to critically re-construct the vision of the future of the subject animating the data capitalists driving Space 2.0. The conclusions are as follows: The New Space understanding of the humankind that will go to space is different from past astrofuturisms. In these astrofuturisms the fantasy was that some future humankind would dwell beyond the Earth, and these beings were cognitively human—if not necessarily physically so. But Space 2.0 emerges when the human intellect is accepted to have no future. Astrofuturism 2.0 is thus equivalent to accepting the death of the subjects of previous astrofuturisms. It is a product of the belief that we will become beings capable of colonizing the cosmos precisely when we accept to sacrifice the human subject and its cognitive limits in favor of a hyperintelligent form of post-consciousness attained by uploading our minds onto our computers and so re-engineering our cognitive architecture. It traces this newfound willingness to sacrifice of the human forms of experience to a collective failure to properly imagine and understand how the radical new relation to space initiated by the Space Age has shaped the constitution of the subject and its desires in the uncanny epoch that we call the Anthropocene.

O artigo se desenvolve a partir de uma entrevista realizada com o artista transmídia, pesquisador e professor Edgar Franco, mais conhecido como Ciberpajé. De maneira geral, o texto apresenta as bases do processo criativo e poético do artista, e suas reflexões sobre a arte. As perguntas que estruturaram a base do artigo tiveram como objetivo discutir a inserção de novas tecnologias nas artes visuais contemporâneas, com destaque para os videogames. As possibilidades que a linguagem dos games oferecem para os artistas, e os motivos de sua rejeição como produtos artísticos pelo ambiente acadêmico e em galerias de arte contemporânea. O texto também apresenta brevemente a recepção à obra de gamearte Posthuman Ms. Pacman, destacando questões sobre a inserção da sexualidade em trabalhos artísticos, o ensino de artes visuais e a atual polarização política. E por fim, a censura sofrida por Franco ao se apresentar na UniEvangélica com a sua banda performática, Posthuman Tantra.

Palavras chaves: Gamearte, Edgar Franco, sexo, censura

Para além da ciência e do anthropos: deslocamentos da antropologia da ciência e da tecnologia no Brasil A antropologia da ciência e da tecnologia (ACT) no Brasil tem se desenvolvido com grande fôlego, principalmente a partir da virada para o século XXI. Este artigo oferece um mapeamento inicial desse campo no que concerne ao período entre 2010 e 2018. Diante das limitações de fornecer um panorama mais abrangente, optamos pela combinação de diferentes estratégias: análise de publicações em periódicos científicos e coletâneas; mapeamento das abordagens e temáticas presentes nos eventos científicos; e informações complementares relativas a teses e dissertações. Espera-se indicar pistas acerca dos investimentos de pesquisa, possivelmente mais consolidados, divulgados nas revistas mais qualificadas do país e nas coletâneas de artigos e acerca da produção emergente de conhecimento registrada nos anais dos congressos da área. Os resultados do mapeamento revelaram a concentração da produção nos seguintes eixos: conceitos e métodos da ACT; biomedicina e saúde; gêneros e sexualidades; humanos e não humanos; técnicas; questões ambientais e desenvolvimento.

RESUMO Partindo-se da noção de "outros estruturais" do sujeito projetado/produzido pela tradição humanista, apresentada por Braidotti (2011; 2013; 2016), defende-se que as tecnologias da escrita, notadamente o texto e o livro, são elementos constitutivos do sujeito do humanismo e que tais tecnologias têm seus "outros estruturais" a serem também considerados. Através do exame de escritas ditas "menores" produzidas por interlocutores relevantes do pensamento pós-humanista crítico e de outros tipos de escrita produzidos por dois artistas contemporâneos, que atuam no campo da dramaturgia e das artes plásticas, procura-se demonstrar como funcionam esses outros dos modelos de escrita consolidados pela tradição humanista, notadamente os modelos grafocêntricos do racionalismo tecno-científico. Na medida em que favorecem a produção de devires por um sujeito material e situacionalmente encarnado, em contraposição a um cógito ou consciência transcendental desencar...

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

French film theorist André Bazin was fascinated by films in which humans and animals are framed together, especially in circumstances in which the presence of one signals the endangerment of the other. By putting Bazin and two films he admired ( Kon Tiki and Umberto D) in conversation with Jacques Derrida's writing on the animal and Walter Benjamin's infrahuman optics, this article argues that Bazin's commitments to cinematic realism and the recurrence in his writing of human/animal propinquity signal a distinctly posthumanist ethics. Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration realizes Bazin's interest in a cinema that de-centers and even absents the human. It may also be a film that answers Derrida's call that we not just look at animals, but feel ourselves seen by them.

The discourse of the ‘Anthropocene’ has quickly become pervasive, cross-cutting different fields of knowledge. However, it is also a deeply contested category. In the critical light shed by political ecology, we reflect on the conceptual blindspots that mark its narrative, identifying it as a symptom of a broader impasse of the neoliberal governmentality of nature and of the ecological crisis today. On the one hand, the Anthropocene narrative proposes a post-humanist vision, which potentially de-centres anthropocentrism. On the other hand, this same vision becomes an alibi for ever deeper and less reflective interventions of human beings on the biosphere, in particular through technoscientific developments. This paradox responds to a specific need for capitalist valorization of ‘Nature’ and, at the same time, does not seem capable to elaborate solutions to the ecological crisis as a whole. However, if the Anthropocene becomes visible only in the present historical contingency and du...

RESUMO Partindo-se da noção de "outros estruturais" do sujeito projetado/produzido pela tradição humanista, apresentada por Braidotti (2011; 2013; 2016), defende-se que as tecnologias da escrita, notadamente o texto e o livro, são elementos constitutivos do sujeito do humanismo e que tais tecnologias têm seus "outros estruturais" a serem também considerados. Através do exame de escritas ditas "menores" produzidas por interlocutores relevantes do pensamento pós-humanista crítico e de outros tipos de escrita produzidos por dois artistas contemporâneos, que atuam no campo da dramaturgia e das artes plásticas, procura-se demonstrar como funcionam esses outros dos modelos de escrita consolidados pela tradição humanista, notadamente os modelos grafocêntricos do racionalismo tecno-científico. Na medida em que favorecem a produção de devires por um sujeito material e situacionalmente encarnado, em contraposição a um cógito ou consciência transcendental desencarnada, afirma-se que os tipos de escrita examinados são relevantes para uma reflexão pós-humanista crítica. Palavras-chave: pós-humanismo; escrita; assemblage. ABSTRACT Based on the notion of "structural others" of the humanistic subject (BRAIDOTTI, 2011, 2013, 2016), it is argued that writing technologies, in particular the text and the book, are constitutive elements of this subject and that the "structural others" of these writing technologies should also be considered. To illustrate the structural others of the writing models consolidated by the humanistic tradition, especially the grafocentric models of technical-scientific rationalism, the so-called "minor" writings produced by relevant humanistic authors and other types of writing produced by two contemporary artists working in the field of dramaturgy and the visual arts are examined. It is claimed that such writings are relevant to a post-humanist critical reflection because they favor the production of becomings by a materially and situationally embodied subject, as opposed to a cogito or disembodied transcendental consciousness.

Flanagan, P. ; Frankjaer, R.
TEI 2018 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 18 March 2018, Vol.2018-, pp.611-616

This project involves a series of walks in rewilded environments mediated by a wearable interface, that enables the interlocutor to perceive the environment from an alien perspective. The aim is to foster empathy for other-than-human entities and promulgate holistic and biodiverse ecologies. Technocrafting the prosthetic device from organic and electronic materials by blending traditional with digital techniques, create devices that the authors term 'cyborganic'. The focus of this paper is a device that sits as if grafted around the human head, and appears to come to life embodied with its own sense of 'agency'. This paper describes the 1 st and 2 nd generation prototype of this device, and its current configuration as an aid for empathetic experience of insects in rewilded spaces. To conclude we describe a testing methodology developed in Aarhus based on a series of walks with users where they engage in semi-structured interviews post-walk to evaluate their experience.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n2p71Neste ensaio, proponho pensar em possibilidades de leitura de obras literária que não se restrinjam à tradição hermenêutica e abram espaço para uma vivência afetiva da literatura, isto é, para seus efeitos sensoriais, perceptuais e emocionais. Para tanto, entendo que a tendência muitas vezes chamada pós-humanista – que se volta, por exemplo, ao pensamento etológico e a reflexões oriundas da ficção científica – pode ser complementada pela antropologia, e o perspectivismo ameríndio, na configuração de um espaço híbrido na consciência, em um imaginário somático e cinético.

For decades, discussions of the impacts of technology on the material body have featured prominently in post-humanist discourse. From Donna Haraway's oft-cited “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) to Katherine Hayles's How We Become Post-Human (1999) to Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work (2009), an uneasy relationship exists between the networked, electrified, mechanical functionality of computational systems and the material or “meat” bodies of human users of those systems. Whether embracing the potentials or decrying the alienation of “humanity” brought about by the affective gap between the sensual body and the networks it engages by the tap-tap-tapping of fingers on keyboards, anxiety continues to surface relative to how we perceive ourselves as corporeal beings in a largely flattened, detached, and fragmented cybernetic world.

Da più di un decennio il concetto di "postumano" è entrato, a pieno titolo, nel vocabolario tanto della cultura loso ca quanto dell'immaginario popolare. Dal Cyborg Manifesto di Donna Haraway ai replicanti di Blade Runner, passando per le narrazioni post-apocalittiche della cinematogra a contemporanea, il postumano indica uno scarto lieve ma decisivo, tramite cui l'umano viene, al contempo, mantenuto e superato. La galleria di "immagini", qui offerta, esula da un'analisi meramente concettuale del termine per esibire, attraverso narrazioni, temi e discipline eterogenee, la posizione di scarto che le parole postumano e post-storia individuano. Dalle visioni mistiche di Philip K. Dick alla ne della storia di Alexander Kojève, dalle distopie romanzesche di Michel Houellebecq e H. P. Lovecraft al guardiano del godimento Sven Marquardt, i ritratti presentati si situano tutti nello spazio aperto di quel "post" che unisce e divide due volti speculari, ma irriducibili, dello stesso "umano".

Abstract The artist Wilma Cruise's exploration of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) as an iconic and thematic motif for her recent series of exhibitions, collectively titled ‘The Alice Sequence’ (2011–2012), presents a theoretically rich exploration of the human/ animal dialectic. This article explores key notions of inter-species communication and distinction that arise from Cruise's artistic exploration, also the practice-led component of her doctoral study. I argue that Cruise's interest in this fanciful text stems from the proliferation of distinctive animal characters in Carroll's oeuvre; in particular the credible ‘force’ of the creatures of Wonderland who, in their fictional veracity, resist (to some extent) a descent into becoming solely allegorical conduits. Carroll's fantastical realm, where humans and animals converse with each other, is fertile ground for an artistic and theoretical contemplation of human and animal cognisant difference (a concept at the core of anthropological distinction). In pursuing this direction I explicate Cruise's extension of Carroll's fictional trope into the Freudian and Lacanian terrain of the preconscious and pre-linguistic modality (Cruise 2012: 17–20), which Cruise links to the phenomenon of horse-training methodologies that foreground bodily modes of communication between horses and their human trainers (Cruise 2012: 18). The ‘bodily register’ of écriture féminine is also connected to this theoretical grouping as a repurposed framework for revising notions of human logo-centric supremacy over animal beings. Further theoretical formulations that disregard preconceived conceptions of human and animal capacity, such as Actor Network Theory, are discussed in relation to this premise. Selected artworks from Cruise's ‘The Alice Sequence’ are analysed in relation to these theoretical paradigms, with the conclusion that Cruise's disarticulated use of text and image enacts the estrangement of logo-centric reason from physical interspecies ontology. This artistic dislodgement of certainty in the prerogative of language to enforce human superiority over non-human beings, places emphasis on the bodily presence of Cruise's sculptural animal figures, in an artistic echo of pre-linguistic modes of communication.

This paper explores how the spatiality of South Africa's apartheid regime remains a structuring motif in the way young South Africans perceive and talk about place and space, despite that fact that apartheid officially 'ended' in 1994. Illustrating our argument with data collected in focus groups at the University of the Western Cape, we refer to such constellations of place and subjectivities as a 'zombie landscape' in the sense that the 'undead' and highly racialized ways of speaking about space and place continue to 'haunt' the present. We develop our argument using a mesh of concepts that link the imagining of place to the formation of intergenerational subjectivity. First, we use a notion of 'trace' in order to conceptualize how place is imagined out of the circulation of memories of apartheid and fragments of experience. Secondly, in order to further interrogate how place engages the formation of subjectivity, we turn to a post-humanist expansion of Du Bois' model of stance-subjectivity. And thirdly, we attempt to account for the longue duree of the trope of apartheid as place by discussing how a Foucauldian subjectification can be reconciled with a posthumanist Freudian notion of condensation. We conclude by suggesting that this approach to landscapes of the imagination has the potential to inform new research directions in Linguistic Landscapes, particularly towards a post-humanist perspective.

Sans les idealiser, les exagerer, ou les diaboliser, incontestablement, les technologies de l’information et de la communication transforment le monde et ses habitants. Bien que la rapidite de ces transformations en cours en rende l’apprehension ethnographique difficile, le point de depart de notre cadre conceptuel est qu’il est non seulement possible, mais imperatif, de mieux cerner le caractere multiple et souvent inattendu de ces changements. Les textes rassembles dans l’ouvrage Humanites reticulaires proposent une reflexion epistemologique, elaboree a partie d’enquetes de terrain minutieuses, sur les effets de la globalisation, des technologies et des images sur l’humain et sur le rapport a l’alterite, au cœur du projet anthropologique. Trois debats clefs, qui correspondent aux trois parties de l’ouvrage, sont ouverts : d’abord, la pluralite potentielle des anthropologies versus l’impossible decolonisation d’une discipline ethno-centree et les modalites concretes d’enquetes en c...

In recent years, genocide scholars have given greater attention to the dangers posed by climate change for increasing the prevalence or intensity of genocide. Challenges related to forced migration, resource scarcity, famine, and other threats of the Anthropocene are identified as sources of present and future risk, especially for those committed to genocide prevention. We approach the connection between the natural and social aspects of genocide from a different angle. Our research emanates out of a North American Indigenous studies and new materialist rather than Euro-genocide studies framework, meaning we see the natural and the social (or cultural) as inseparable, deeply imbricated, phenomena. We argue that those entities designated natural are often engaged in co-constitutive relations with the social and cultural groups that are the focus of genocide studies. Simply put, groups become what they are through interaction—or symbiogenesis—with their natural world(s). Symbiogenetic...

Holger Pötzsch: Katherine Hayles, your idea of posthumanism is inspired by cybernetics and by a new attentiveness to the body and materiality? N. Katherine Hayles: Posthumanism as I define it in my book How We Became Posthuman (1999) was in part about the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and the attributes

This article proposes a Samoan indigenous philosophical position to reconceptualise the dialogic spaces of talanoa; particularly how talanoa is applied methodologically to research practice. Talanoa within New Zealand Pacific research scholarship is problematised, raising particular tensions of the universal and humanistic ideologies that are entrenched within institutional ethics and research protocols. The dialogic relational space which is embedded throughout talanoa methodology is called into question, evoking alternative ways of knowing and being within the talanoa research assemblage[1] (including the material-world). Samoan epistemology reveals that nature is constituted within personhood (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017) and that nature is co-agentic with human in an ecology of knowing. We call for a shift in thinking material-ethics that opens talanoa to a materialist process ontology, where knowledge generation emerges through human and non-human encounters.     [1] The concept o...

The contradictions inherent in European Enlightenment-based "logics" that externalize humans from "nature" were a concern for the Romantic Naturalists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. More recently, some in the environmental humanities and socio-ecologically-concerned arts and sciences have also posed challenges to anthropocentric, hierarchical, positivist modes of thought. I suggest that by engaging the ludic, imaginative, and collaborative while bearing the empirical in mind, dualisms (such as objective and subjective, individual and collective) dissipate, and existence as a dialectical state of intricate ensemble can be revealed. In light of catastrophic disruption to Earth's life-sustaining processes by exploitative forms of human activity, I argue an "ecological imaginary" is urgently needed, and everyone is capable of contributing to its prefiguring.

Academia often talks about wanting to have an impact on the world: from trying to influence policymaking (Sasse and Haddon, 2019; Webster, 2007) to trying to find metrics for impacts beyond academia (Ravenscroft et al., 2017). Yet, transformative impacts on the world often seem remote. Many authors claim that post-humanism in particular has a problem in translating its theory into supporting social movements and creating political impacts. Some theorists even suggest that posthumanism might actually be "undoing the possibility of a political project altogether" (Braidotti, 2019, p. 42). This text sets out to identify the tensions around the way post-humanist politics has been framed and find a new way of connecting the dots between post-human theory and direct and specific ways of intervening in the world. The paper maps out an anarchist-influenced post-humanism as proposed in Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and Cudworth and Hobden's (2018) emancipatory posthuman politics. The contribution of this paper is to show how the notion of 'multiple ontologies' (Mol, 2002) and 'insurgent posthumanism' (Papadopoulos, 2010, 2018) can be used to create a form of insurrection training for researchers to acquire an 'ontological imagination' (Nowak, 2013) that can support them in creating interventions in the world. Using an example of the landmark 'Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares action' (1996), the case study identifies two key components of post-human politics: specificity of intervention and reflexive training practices. Finally, the paper proposes that post-humanist researchers can apply insurrection training in their daily lives to experience ontological difference, de-trivialise the everyday, connect to social movements, make post-human politics 'doable' and offer 'direct' change.

In this article, we make the case for home gardens to be understood as “open-air” laboratories— sites of experimentation, collaboration, and negotiation both among humans and non-humans. Our examination specifically draws on case studies from Amazonia to highlight the deep history of concentrated human activities in gardens (or garden-like environments) as well as their ongoing importance for contemporary agrobiodiversity management, historical memory, and socio-cultural continuity in the face of modernization and environmental change. We discuss how Amazonian home gardens have evolved over time and how they serve to challenge Euro-American conceptions of gardens. Through an examination of both ethnobotanical and archaeological research, we show that Amazonian home gardens are manifestations of deeply rooted histories of experimentation with the diversity of Amazonian life.

Este articulo se propone reflexionar sobre el discurso que, desde la revista institucional de la ONG Aves Argentinas, sostiene la necesidad de modernizacion y continuidad del Zoologico de Buenos Aires. Realiza una lectura critica de los argumentos expresados en dos articulos de esas publicaciones desde marcos teoricos que provienen del campo de las Ciencias Sociales, como las Teorias Anticapitalistas, el Pensamiento Decolonial, los Estudios Criticos Animales y la Ecologia de Saberes y postula que es necesaria la introduccion de estas ideas a la practica de la Conservacion de la Biodiversidad. En ese sentido, la controversia surgida a raiz de la crisis del Zoologico de Buenos Aires puede servir para reflexionar, tanto sobre su rol presente y futuro ante la crisis ambiental global, como para cuestionar los modos en que nuestra sociedad se relaciona con la naturaleza. Palabras clave: zoologico, conservacion de biodiversidad, modernidad, animalismo, anticapitalismo ---------------------...

Children's intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans – here children – as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of children's entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked “thing-matter-energy- child-assemblages” that wer...

The essay proposes that the female, pan-Indian tradition of drawing threshold designs offers the potential of articulating a counter-epistemology of the South that differences prevalent approaches to the post-colonial and the global in the visual field. Based on its Tamil variant, the multiple marginalization of this vernacular practice is argued as indicative of larger issues and the fact that none of the prevalent methodological frameworks for discussing the visual cater for its aesthetic registers. On the basis of this acknowledgment, the practice’s very ‘strangeness’ is re-framed as a gift for radical aesthetic enquiry. The discussion draws on the Boaventura de Sousa Santos, notion of the post-abyssal, Parul Dave Mukherji’s critique of existing approaches to global art history and her call for a differenced meta-theory, Ashis Nandy’s reframing of notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as well as Deleuze and Guattari connective notions of subjectivity and post-human aesthetics. (The link below should allow you to download the paper for free).

In this paper, I approach learning as a process of rethinking the world that happens via the surprising experience of "enchantment." This process becomes possible by dwelling, that is, by forming meaningful multisensory engagements with one's surroundings. I present my arguments by discussing photo-walks that students conducted in Helsinki as part of a geography-learning project. During the photo-walks, learning happened with the spaces of hanging out. In contrast to common understandings of learning, this learning with the city is non-instrumental: it is making the familiar unfamiliar by paying attention to the particular in everyday spaces. Methods such as photography are understood as creative encounters that can help in recognizing the world and fostering one's ethical sensitivity.

Networked technologies have created many learning opportunities and led to new learning models such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, MOOCs are an evolving learning model that are even today changing according to learners’ needs. First generation cMOOCs and second generation xMOOCs are now being followed by third generation hybrid MOOCs. In these evolution cycles, there are many experimental practices such as the use of bot-teachers. This study examines and explains hybrid MOOCs and then focuses on the use of bot-teachers within a post-humanist perspective, using teaching presence from the community of inquiry (CoI) and actor-network theory (ANT) as theoretical lenses. The research findings reveal that, while the use of bot-teachers is promising and beneficial in terms of facilitating and increasing discourse, it is ineffective in providing other components of teaching presence such as direct instruction, and/or design and organisation. However, analysis found that th...

Down the rabbit hole: where we can talk to the animals So she [Alice] was considering in her mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‗Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural).