Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism

We (founding members of the Critical Posthumanism Network and editors of the Genealogy of the Posthuman) are excited to share that our new co-edited Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is now in production! This handbook boasts 54 chapters on figurations and prefigurations of the posthuman, posthumanist practices and methodologies, processes of institutional and disciplinary transformation, and more. 

Around 30 chapters are already available online, with more coming very soon. A hard copy will follow later this year.  

From the Preface:

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism assembles critical interventions on the discourse of posthumanism and the posthuman. Posthumanism is a paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism and notions of humanity posed by the erosion of traditional demarcations between who/what counts as human and nonhuman. It problematises anthropocentrism, speciesism and biopolitics, and informs new creative practices from bioart to electronic literature. It impacts institutional changes across the life sciences, new media and the theoretical humanities and reflects the ways in which lifeworlds are reshaped in the embracing of digitalisation, globalisation, virtualisation, prosthesisation and enhancement. The technological, economic and ecological challenges of our time and the uncertainty about human, nonhuman and planetary futures these processes spell out call for alternative ways of thinking about humanity and its others.

In surveying as well as commenting on the emerging posthumanist paradigm within the academy but also within culture more generally, this Handbook focuses on work that engages critically and creatively with the challenges and affordances that posthumanism provides. It investigates and contextualises the transformative potential of current developments and relates them to past and existing traditions, ideas and practices, as well as to speculations on alternative or emergent scenarios of the human, nonhuman, posthuman, inhuman, ahuman … as well as their entanglements and socialities.

The Handbook focuses on figurations and prefigurations of the posthuman, posthumanist practices and methodologies, as well as processes of institutional and disciplinary transformations. It upholds new inter- and transdisciplinary encounters between the humanities and the sciences that have led to collaborative practices and greater political and ethical awareness of the place of the human, the nonhuman, and their environments, especially in connection with pressing issues like climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the loss of biodiversity, global migration flows, terrorism, insecurity, biopolitics and extinction, as well as the problematic legacies of colonialism and eurocentrism. It recognises too the importance of rethinking the relationship between human agency, the role of technology and the nature-culture divide.

You can access the handbook and individual chapters as they are published through SpringerLink. Three chapters from the handbook are also available to download for free until the end of April 2022: