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The purpose of this paper is to articulate an ontological anarchist approach for an engaged post-human politics and present insurrection training as a pragmatic tool for researchers to directly transform the world.

The paper analyses how post-humanism has been criticised for dissolving political agency. It shows that this is due to the way post-humanism has been framed as sensitising and including non-humans into liberal politics. Instead, the paper examines anarchist-influenced post-humanism and combines this with the notion of multiple ontologies and ontological interventions. The paper presents the notion of insurrection training as offering the possibility for researchers to become emotionally sensitised to ontological difference. A case study of the “Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares action” (1996) is used to illustrate what insurrection training and ontological interventions look like in practice. Finally, the paper makes suggestions as to how post-human researchers can apply this approach in their everyday lives.

The paper suggests that beyond a liberal framing of post-humanism as inclusion, there is also an ontological anarchist post-humanism that can support transformative impacts in the world. This form of post-humanism offers specificity of intervention and reflexive training practices. Insurrection training can offer new possibilities for post-humanist researchers: experience ontological difference, de-trivialise the everyday, connect to social movements, make post-human politics “doable” and offer “direct” change.

The paper addresses discussions that claim post-humanism is disabling political change. Its contribution is to map an anarchist post-humanism and extend this with concepts of multiple ontologies. It proposes the notion of insurrection training which places attention on the role of the researcher as an active agent that needs to be sensitised to ontological difference to carry out interventions. A case study of direct action illustrates what ontological intervention and insurrection training look like in practice. The case study suggests that insurrection training is an everyday performative practice that integrates and negotiates the personal, material and political. Finally, the paper suggests how researchers can adopt such an approach in their everyday lives.

This essay asks: How can we understand and theorise the impacts of robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on everyday life based on Radical Humanism? How can Lefebvre's ideas be used to reveal the ideological character of contemporary accounts of the impacts of robots and AI on society? It engages with rather unknown works of the Radical Humanist Henri Lefebvre on the sociology and philosophy of technology such as Vers le cybernanthrope (Towards the Cybernanthrope). Foundations of a Lefebvrian, dialectical, Radical Humanist approach to the sociology and philosophy of technology are presented. This essay introduces Lefebvre's notion of the cybernanthrope and sets it in relation to robots and AI in contemporary society. Based on Lefebvre's critique of the cybernanthrope, this chapter develops foundations of the ideology critique of robots and AI in digital capitalism. It discusses examples of technological deterministic and social constructivist thought in the context of robotics, AI, and cyborgs and argues for an alternative, Lefebvrian, dialectical approach. This essay situates Humanism in the context of computing, AI and robotics. The chapter advances a Lefebvrian Radical Humanism by engaging in analyses of AI and robots in Post-humanism, Transhumanism, techno-deterministic approaches, social construction of technology approaches, techno-optimism, techno-pessimism, acceleratonism, the mass unemployment hypothesis and Spike Jonze's movie Her. This chapter shows that the major lesson we can learn from the Radical Humanist sociology of technology and Henri Lefebvre's works on technology is that Radical Humanism helps creating and sustaining technologies for the many, not the few. This insight remains of high relevance in the age of digital capitalism, smart robots and AI.

This study examines distinctive economic reform measures pursued in post-independent Zambia and ethical problems which plagued the reform process. The study begins with a review of the philosophy of Zambian Humanism, the ideology which guided Zambia’s early reform initiatives. Specific reform measures pursued within the framework of humanism focused on: increased state control of the economy; indigenization of the public and private sectors, accelerated development of the rural sector, and use of a series of policy measures to curb domestic exploitation. Beginning in the mid-1980s, deepening economic crisis forced the government to retract most humanist-based reform measures in favor of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) induced reforms within the framework of structural adjustment and economic liberalization. Post-Humanism reform initiatives built on previous World Bank and IMF formulated framework, but stalled due in part to increase in ethical misbehavior in higher levels of government.

This paper aims to elucidate the systemic processes underlying the enhanced information-control measures taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. The tightening of state information control has stimulated increasingly sophisticated methods of disseminating information on the part of professional and citizen journalists. Drawing on social systems theory as articulated by Niklas Luhmann and others, the authors frame the CCP’s enhanced information-control efforts as a response to the increasing systemic complexity of Chinese journalism, which is part of a self-reproducing, self-regulating (autopoietic) global journalism system. The authors use both subtle and overt protests over Chinese censorship as evidence for the journalism system’s increasing complexity and autonomy. The authors observe that levels of complexity ratchet up as the CCP and Chinese journalism counter each other’s moves. Finally, the authors suggest that the increasing complexity of the CCP’s information-control apparatus may be unsustainable.

The authors ground their argument in Luhmannian social systems theory.

The CCP's effort to control journalism leads to increased internal complexity in the form of huge bureaucracies that themselves must be overseen in an almost endless proliferation of surveillance.

This paper contributes to theoretical work in post-humanism.

To the authors’ knowledge, no studies have examined the tension between CCP censors and Chinese journalism from a Luhmannian systems theory perspective.

The last few decades have seen the rise of a new field of inquiry – human–animal studies (HAS). As a rich, theoretically and disciplinarily diverse field, HAS shines a light on the various relations that humans have with other animals across time, space and culture. While still a small, but rapidly growing field, HAS has supported the development of multiple theoretical and conceptual initiatives which have aimed to capture the rich diversity of human–animal interactions. Yet the methodologies for doing this have not kept pace with the ambitions of such projects. In this chapter, we seek to shed light on this particular issue.

We consider the difficulties of researching other-than-human beings by asking what might happen if methods incorporated true inter-disciplinarity, for instance if social scientists were able to work with natural scientists on multi-species ethnographies. The lack of established methodology (and the lack of cross disciplinary research between the natural and social sciences) is one of the main problems that we consider here. It is an issue complicated immensely by the ‘otherness’ of animals – the vast differences in the ways that we (humans) and they (animals) see the world, communicate and behave. This chapter provides the opportunity for us to consider how we can take account of (if not resolve) these differences to arrive at meaningful research data, to better understand the contemporary world by embarking upon more precise investigations of our relationships with animals.

Drawing upon a selection of examples from contemporary research of human–animal interactions, both ethnographic and scientific, we shed light on some new possibilities for multi-species research. We suggest that this can be done best by considering and applying a diversity of theoretical frameworks which deal explicitly with the constitution of the social environment.

Our methodological exploration offers the reader insight into new ways of working within the template of human animal studies by drawing upon a range of useful theories such as post-structuralism and actor network theory (ANT) (for example, Callon, 1986; Hamilton & Taylor, 2013; Latour, 2005; Law, Ruppert, & Savage, 2011) and post-humanist perspectives (for example, Anderson, 2014; Haraway, 2003; Wolfe, 2010). Our contribution to this literature is distinctive because rather than remaining at the philosophical level, we suggest how the human politics of method might be navigated practically to the benefit of multiple species.

Care-fully attending to the ontologies embedded within educational research, this chapter provokes readers to consider the epistemic worlding of qualitative research. Drawing on the intersections of feminist poststructuralism, post-humanism, and new material feminisms, educational research can be seen as happening to worlds while also making worlds. As such, educational researchers are invited to care for the ethical entanglement among the research, researcher, researched, and reader. Bringing diverse mo(ve)ments into conversation, a minor sequence for decentering the educational researcher is presented. One example is the destabilization of conventional data triangulation through “Talking Triads.” Thinking with/in a multimodal triad gestures toward the possibility of engaging all scholarship as an intimate endeavor. More specifically, this chapter begins to illuminate how textual re/presentations of becoming-minor inherently raise tensions between nonhuman structures (e.g., time, tradition, concepts, mirrors, literature) and the human experience of being-educational researcher. From mirrors to monsters, the manifestation of “I” becomes-with/in that which is more than human.

Introducing the concepts of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), the chapter provides an overview of frameworks and approaches used to manage workforce diversity. First, the authors introduce the notion of the old deal based on the uneven relationship between human diversity, nature, and technological innovation. The chapter then explores the new deal between humans, nature, and technology. The authors are providing cases from the EU, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Iceland to show the emergence of the new deal in managing diversity.

A lot has been written on zombies lately and on the rather conservative US-American TV Show The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–) in particular. A lot less has been written on the SyFy-Show Z Nation (2014–), although it is a sophisticated feminist take on the zombie lore. Centring around a group of survivors, who escort a human–zombie–cyborg across the US and Mexico, the show not only undermines the patriarchalism of its archetype, but also raises questions of post-humanism by the means of Donna Haraway or Rosi Braidotti. With the help of media-self-reflexive parody and pastiche, the series comments on its extradiegetic world as much as on its own genre and offers a deconstruction of stereotypical (gendered) tropes and conventions. In the following chapter, I use a selective close reading of the text and its representation politics to demonstrate how a feminist deconstruction of zombie-horror can come into being and how an (academic) distinction between Quality and Trash TV can be just as regressive as productive in this process.