Dr. Margrit Shildrick (Linköping University) will be presenting the talk “Approaching Posthumanism: prostheses, technologies, and embodiment” on Monday, March 6, 14:00-15:30, in Plaza 600F.

Abstract: In the era of postmodernity, issues of bodies and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very boundaries of what counts as human. Where in the past, the term prosthesis intended some material object that compensated for a substantive and negatively figured lack in embodiment, the emphasis now is firmly on enhancement and supplement. For many disabled people – whose interface with the world may rely to a greater or lesser extent on the deployment of prostheses – the mode of rehabilitation to normative practices is no longer the point; instead prostheses may be highly productive alternatives that inevitably queer experience itself. Going further, the notion of technological supplementarity can be transformed to encompass an understanding of embodiment as necessarily entailing assemblage – in both organic, non-organic and hybrid forms – as a mode of existence that troubles our human privilege.