On the 7th of October, Human Futures celebrated the publication of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism with a book launch at ARoS. You can find the full-length recording from the book launch here or watch 8 minutes of short highlights by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Jacob Wamberg and the co-authors Steve Fuller, Karin Kukkonen, Ursula Heise, and Alexander Wilson below.

About The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism

"As our ideas of the human have come under increasing challenges – from technological change, from medical advances, from the existential threat of climate crisis, from an ideological decentering of the human, amongst many other things – the 'posthuman' has become an increasingly central topic in the Humanities. Bringing together leading scholars from across the world and a wide range of disciplines, this is the most comprehensive available survey of cutting edge contemporary scholarship on posthumanism in literature, culture and theory."

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism is divided into four sections covering the essential topics of the vast and varied field of posthumanism. The first section, Paradigms and Transformations, frames post humanism in relation to a number of guiding concepts, beginning with humanism and continuing through other pivotal perspectives, such as the Anthropocene, transhumanism, and the human.

The second section, Ethics, surveys a number of fields that give rise to new ethical considerations in an era of post-anthropocentric thought and technological development. From relations with nonhumans to the question of the unity of humanity and human rights, the questions of rights, opportunities, and identity appear quite different than they used to not too long ago, when cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and section of fertilised eggs based on genetic analysis were at best a vision in science fiction and not part of a pressing reality. 

The following section, Technology, gives a broad, if selective, view of technologies that already have, and may be projected as having, a profound influence on the human condition.

Finally, Aesthetics take up the many ways that different forms of art and popular culture have either responded to aspects of post humanism, or projected new developments. In contemporary art, the jury is still out on its predictive powers, but in hindsigt there are numerous examples of how the human fictitious imaginary has taken part it shaping human futures.

Read more and buy the book at: 

www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-bloomsbury-handbook-of-posthumanism-9781350090477/