Posthumanism. ecocriticism, environmental humanities

general courses

Remote learning

The lecture will be a general introduction to issues related to the current trends in the humanities aimed at overcoming the anthropocentric paradigm of perceiving the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world around them. On the one hand, they are motivated by the current planetary crisis and the new concepts of human and more-than-human agency in the world, and on the other hand by the development of new technologies in the context of autonomous machines and artificial intelligence. The focus of the lecture will be on the first of the above-mentioned aspects as a platform for interdisciplinary considerations on the border of the humanities, natural and social sciences. Due to such a wide interdisciplinarity of the approaches presented during the lecture (for example, Karen Barad’s model of “agencial realism” refers directly to quantum physics), it is addressed not only to students of humanities, but also to people studying in other fields interested in their correlation with the issues of contemporary humanities research.

– students know the basic concepts of contemporary environmental humanities and posthumanism (e.g. new materialism, ecocriticism, ecopoetics, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, etc.),

– students know the basic terms and notions in the field of posthumanism and environmental humanities (e.g. cyborg, agencial realism, posthuman, natureculture, anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene, dark ecology, ecology without nature, ANT, etc.),

– students can navigate in interdisciplinary contexts and multi-level scientific discourses within the scope provided for in the curriculum,

– students understand the relationship between scientific discourse, life attitudes and the planetary phenomena in the context of the ecological crisis on Earth.