Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Fall 2023

Date of Submission

2023-06-15

Advisor

Nudrat Kamal, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Committee

Dr. Shehram Mokhtar, Assistant Professor & Program Coordinator, BS (SSLA), Department of Social Sciences

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Abstract

We cannot say, with any certainty, that we are only human. Now, more than ever, in these precarious times of the climate crisis, we are confronted with the necessity of rethinking what it means to be human. Posthuman thought enables this confrontation and re-articulation. A posthuman subject is different from a humanist one in its acknowledgement of biological embodiment, and posthuman bodies have been widely speculated in SF texts. This project utilizes these SF texts and their re-articulations of the human to suggest alternate modes of existence. Although the way forward and towards these alternate modes of existence is never clear, SF is a meaningful way to theorize sustainable forms of societal transformation. In regards to the climate crisis, SF is a post-anthropocentric mode of response as it can be utilized to imagine these collective futures that thrive on kinship1 rather than domination. This project looks to three SF texts, This Is How You Lose the Time War, Parable of the Sower and Indra’s Web to unsettle humanist notions of the human subject and capitalistic modes of existence in the world to argue for kinship as an alternate mode of existence. Kinship hence, is a mode of resistance.

Pages

75

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