The modern human is a cordless Theseus. We are neither male nor female, and we are within the labyrinth, armed not with weapons or determination, but with cell phones…………We are all within the labyrinth, which is now a crowded place full of humans taking selfies.
Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. His book, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019.
Harry Whitaker is a renowned psychologist and neurolinguist, researching in Cognitive Science, Differential Psychology and Neuropsychology.
In this feature they discuss their experience of Hiroshima.
Anders Sandberg is a James Martin Research Fellow, at the Future of Humanity Institute & Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. His research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics and public policy. He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE, where he also was responsible for public outreach and online presence. Besides scientific publications in neuroscience, ethics, and future studies, he has also participated in the public debate about human enhancement internationally. Anders also held an AXA Research Fellowship and is now the senior researcher in the FHI-Amlin collaboration on systemic risk of risk modelling.
Francesca Ferrando’s forthcoming book, ‘THE ART OF BEING POSTHUMAN’, offers a comprehensive reflection on the existential condition of the 21st century. A visionary introduction to existential posthumanism, it takes the form of eight meditations of posthuman self-inquiry.
Jana Norman is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. Jana also teaches in the English, Creative Writing and Film Department at the University of Adelaide. Jana’s research interests in environmental humanities and legal theory focus on critical and creative approaches to collaborating across difference towards reparative shared futures. Her book, ‘Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene’ (Routledge 2021) received the Socio-Legal Studies Theory and History Book Prize in 2022 and the Chris Beasley Prize for Gender and Sexuality Theory from the Fay Gale Center for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide in 2021.
Between mid-May and the end of June 2020 linguist and author, Florian Coulmas, questioned people around the world about their personal experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Loneliness, Helping Hands, TRUTH’ is the response he received.
Prof. Dr. Dirk Messner is the director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security of United Nations University (UNU-EHS). He is also the Co-Director of the “Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is an internationally recognized expert on the topics of global change, digitalization, and sustainable development, transformation towards the decarbonization of the global economy, global governance and evolution of human cooperation.
Professor Malcolm Fairbairn is a member of the Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology Research Group, Kings College London. His research lies at the boundary between cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics. In particular, he is interested in dark matter, dark energy, cosmological inflation and particle astrophysics. He has been awarded an ERC consolidator grant running from 2015-2020 to study dark matter and particle physics in the early Universe.
The exhibition ‘Borderlines’ gives form to the conceptual, geo-political, economic and cultural impacts of borders. It draws attention to the ownership of the earth beneath our feet, the UK border in Ireland, tribal territories, anarchic polar exploration and the world-wide distribution of natural resources.
Dr Tony D. Sampson is reader in digital culture and communications in the School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI), co-founder of Club Critical Theory and organiser of the Affect and Social Media conferences. His publications include ‘The Spam Book’ (Hampton Press, 2009) ‘Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks’ (Minnesota, 2012), ‘The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture’ (Minnesota, 2016) and ‘Affect and Social Media’ (2018).