The 3rd in the growing series of ParaDoxa podcasts comes out tomorrow. This one is with Professor James Thompson and explores his work using theatre to better understand the aesthetics of care. It’s another wonderful conversation with someone with something genuinely innovative and interesting to say about the future of healthcare.
You may not have noticed it, but the site’s Quote Hord is becoming a bit of a beast. I saw a similar version of this before setting up ParaDoxa and wanted a space for quotes, saying, and parcels of text that inspired me. The Quote Hord has a permanent place on the site if you’re looking for a bit of daily post-critical inspiration (click on the orange link above to take a look).
I had my chat with Michael Rowe last week about all things ChatGPT. I’ve added it to a Leviathan-like page I’ve been updating with news and resources to do with ChatGPT that I’ll tidy up and post up next week. It feels a bit redundant to do it because things are changing so fast, but I’ve been interested mostly in those ideas that might persist long after the hype has died down. Hopefully, you’ll find something in there that’s useful and interesting.
And finally, from friend of ParaDoxa Jess Dillard-Wright (who you’ll be hearing more from in a few week’s time), a call out from Simon Adam at
York Uni in Toronto, Canada that may be of interest to some of you. The full text is below if you’d prefer not to open the attached pdf.
In a world where gaps in social, economic, and health inequities continue to grow on a crisis-riddled planet with exponentially increasing extinction rates of biodiversity, urgent interventions are needed to redress pressing social and political problems that have emerged in and through the Anthropocene. Entangled im/materialities: Transdisciplinary posthuman interventions (under contract with the University of Toronto Press; edited by Simon Adam & Efrat Gold) aims to assemble critical perspectives from a wide variety of disciplines, including nursing, social work, critical disability studies, environmental studies, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy, to name a few. The book is a site for the convergence of diverse approaches that promise to push and pull the boundaries of each respective discipline and yet maintain certain entangled states with one another that create possibilities for a postdisciplinary future. Framed by critical posthumanism, this anthology aims to interrogate and make explicit Humanism’s limitations in both imagining and materializing just practices for a justice-oriented world. The book will offer a postfoundational and postdualist analysis of life, death, health, identity, technology, and knowledge-producing practices–an affirmative ethical intervention that aims to make transdisciplinary ontoepistemological shifts. It centrally engages with such questions as: What emancipatory affirmative possibilities can materialize for the infrahuman, the marginal, the other? What is becoming of the human at the intersections of cognitive capitalism and the 4th industrial revolution? What postdisciplinary futures can be imagined at the nexus of the posthuman convergence? What analytical tools are there to examine the posthuman and how can they be re/theorized and implemented?
The book will put in conversation disciplines traditionally seen as disparate and ‘siloed,’ and correspondingly, destabilize the traditionally held perspective of disciplinary separability and insularity. Trans/interdisciplinary studies have long advanced that striking a convivial relationship is not only effective in achieving collective goals, but also an affirmative response to the critical posthuman project, a critique predicated on the idea that disciplines are identity-based phenomena, and that the more committed a discipline is to its historically held identity, the more isolated and fragmented disciplines become. The book aims to demonstrate that not only is disciplinary separation unsustainable, but neither is disciplinarity itself, and to that effect, a shift toward a monistic, post-disciplinary future is more desirable and more sustainable.
We invite chapter contributions that examine–but are not necessarily limited to–the following ideas:
Artificial intelligence, technology, cyborgization, human/technology hybridity
Indigenous epistemologies and more-than-human relations
Planetarity, planetary ethics, blue humanities
Critical posthuman/new materialist methodology, including arts-based and postqualitative
methods
Critical posthuman analyses of identity/identity politics
Critical posthuman analyses of health/illness/wellness/life/death
Chapter length: 7000 words max.
Deadline by which to express interest in submission: April 30, 2023 Deadline for chapter submission: November 1, 2023
Email all queries to Simon Adam: siadam@yorku.ca