• Volume 1, Issue 1 (Open Issue) Human and Posthuman in Tales of Extinction
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  Via Braidotti, Ranciére and others, the article notes Australia's massive loss of species and examines fiction that points to this problem, seeking ways by which to engage feelings and change attitudes. In a predominantly humanist tradition, novels and stories move from cute animals dressed as humans to more anguished engagements with bird extinctions. All varyingly push people from complacency to envisaging their own extinction, from melancholia to activism, pointing to a posthuman unlearning in which we are no longer exceptional agents, but one more set of actants in and of nature. Following posthuman theorists like Barad and Braidotti, the article surveys Australia's record of species extinctions and assesses novels by Ethel Pedley, Dal Stivens, Josephine Wilson and Richard Flanagan for their handling of ecological crisis.

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  Authored By - Paul Sharrad
• Volume 1, Issue 1 (Open Issue) Non-Anthropocentric Posthumanism and the Stakes of Relationality
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  This paper examines the ontological underpinnings of non-anthropocentric posthumanism through an analysis of the work of Jane Bennett and Rosi Braidotti. I argue that their commitment to relational holism tacitly undermines their stated commitment to individuals by subordinating them to their relations. Drawing on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology and Jacques Derrida’s commitment to a “Leibnizianism without God,” I propose a model of “non-relationist relationality” that preserves the radical alterity and individuality of entities while enabling contingent interactions.

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  Authored By - Niki Young
• Volume 1, Issue 1 (Open Issue) Social Complementarity – the Duality of Individual Objectivity and Group Uncertainty
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  Calculus is seen as describing continuous functions through the act of breaking them down to the smallest possible parts, suggesting that the whole is only an aggregation of its parts. But modern science has demanded the creation of new kinds of measurements, where the deterministic rules of classical physics cease to exist and we can no longer see the individual member parts as sole explanations towards the continuity of the whole. There is a duality between states of dis/continuous being, and we seem to be doomed to only see the measured discontinuous version grounded in our own objectivity. But can the knowledge of this duality maybe help us better understand the social consequences of our world’s massively intraconnected social order? With the infrastructure of modern trade, seemingly instant communication possibilities, and newly created tribes numbering beyond what we thought possible; we have created a world that seem to defy our preconceptions of what social groups and responsibility means. Using agential realism and its groundbreaking insights into quantum philosophy with the idea of complementarity, I think we can start to understand these new states of being, and with it bring about a better grasp of the ethics that are an intrinsic part of all. Setting a foundation for how we can understand the duality of groups and individuals across all areas of our world, seeing complementarity as the grounding state of un/certain objectivity.

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  Authored By - Nils Patrik Svensson
• Volume 1, Issue 1 (Open Issue) Dis-ease: The Affective Experience of Being Hospital-adjacent
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  In this piece of writing-as-analysis (Sharon Murphy Augustine), I seek to make sense of my body’s affective response – the heebie-jeebies – to working at a satellite university campus that is co-located with a hospital. Thinking-with Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, I recount three vignettes – three confrontations – between my body and medical entities that provoke the heebie-jeebies: a feeling of dis-ease. I conclude that staying with the sense of dis-ease may in fact afford the opportunity for doing and being differently in my role as lecturer and education advisor at a medical school.

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  Authored By - Philippa Nicoll Antipas
• Volume 1, Issue 1 (Open Issue) “Retro-Futuristic” Expedition Of Howard Leed’s Small Wonder
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  Popular culture and literature have served as fertile ground for the germination of ideas that eventually find their way into the fabric of the everyday lives of human existence. From the pages of science fiction novels to the silver screen of vanes blockbuster movies, inventions, and innovations conceived in the realm of imagination have often transcended the boundaries of fiction to reshape the world. This research project is an endeavor to explore a similar trajectory of representation of humanoids in a ‘reel’ world portrayal, Howard Leed’s Small Wonder, a nineteen eighties American sci-fi sitcom, and its projection to ‘real life’ humanoids of the twenty-first century. The sitcom shall be analyzed through the critical and philosophical lens of Posthumanism. How the sitcom has been instrumental in the early dawning of the technological renaissance, at the same time how it has reinforced certain stereotypes related to robots and gendered artificial intelligence shall be explored. This research is an amalgamation of Humanities, STS, and Literary Studies encompassing various theories and practical applications, to navigate the nuances of Science Fiction and the field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

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  Authored By - Lovelyn Pinto

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