Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is inherently a human-centric field of technology. The role of feminist theories in related fields (e.g. Human-Computer Interaction, Data Science) are taken as a starting point to present a vision for Feminist HRI which can support better, more ethical HRI practice everyday, as well as a more activist research and design stance. We first define feminist design for an HRI audience and use a set of feminist principles from neighboring fields to examine existent HRI literature, showing the progress that has been made already alongside some additional potential ways forward. Following this we identify a set of reflexive questions to be posed throughout the HRI design, research and development pipeline, encouraging a sensitivity to power and to individuals' goals and values. Importantly, we do not look to present a definitive, fixed notion of Feminist HRI, but rather demonstrate the ways in which bringing feminist principles to our field can lead to better, more ethical HRI, and to discuss how we, the HRI community, might do this in practice.

Objective: Ovarian removal prior to spontaneous/natural menopause (SM) is associated with increased risk of late life dementias including Alzheimer's disease. This increased risk may be related to the sudden and early loss of endogenous estradiol. Women with breast cancer gene mutations (BRCAm) are counseled to undergo oophorectomy prior to SM to significantly reduce their risk of developing breast, ovarian, and cervical cancers. There is limited evidence of the neurological effects of ovarian removal prior to the age of SM showing women without the BRCAm had cortical thinning in medial temporal lobe structures. A second study in women with BRCAm and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) noted changes in cognition. Methods: The present, cross-sectional study examined whole-brain differences in gray matter (GM) volume using high-resolution, quantitative magnetic resonance imaging in women with BRCAm and intact ovaries (BRCA-preBSO [study cohort with BRCA mutation prior to oophorectomy]; n = 9) and after surgery with (BSO + estradiol-based therapy [ERT]; n = 10) and without (BSO; n = 10) postsurgical estradiol hormone therapy compared with age-matched women (age-matched controls; n = 10) with their ovaries. Results: The BRCA-preBSO and BSO groups showed significantly lower GM volume in the left medial temporal and frontal lobe structures. BSO + ERT exhibited few areas of lower GM volume compared with age-matched controls. Novel to this study, we also observed that all three BRCAm groups exhibited significantly higher GM volume compared with age-matched controls, suggesting continued plasticity. Conclusions: The present study provides evidence, through lower GM volume, to support both the possibility that the BRCAm, alone, and early life BSO may play a role in increasing the risk for late-life dementia. At least for BRCAm with BSO, postsurgical ERT seems to ameliorate GM losses.

Background: Past research on polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a chronic endocrine condition, has focused on the experiences of cisgender women.Aims: The purpose of the present study was to address the knowledge gap about gender-diverse individuals by exploring their lived experiences with PCOS and to better understand if and how their gender identity affected their experience of PCOS.Methods: To explore this, we recruited nine non-binary people and one transgender man with a PCOS diagnosis for qualitative interviews.Results: Three overarching themes emerged: PCOS as a burden, PCOS as an occasion, and PCOS as a benefit. While some aspects of PCOS created an additional burden for our participants, other symptoms such as excess body and facial hair could be empowering and affirming, revealing a positive aspect of this chronic condition.Conclusion: This study is the first to describe the lived experiences of gender-diverse individuals with PCOS, uncovering burdens as well as some benefits. Future research in this population may reveal not only the particulars of what PCOS is like for them but also more generalizable insights into the highly gendered perception and treatment of PCOS.

For decades, situational comedies — commonly named “sitcoms” — have been racially segregated on TV between Black-cast sitcoms and White-cast sitcoms. Extensive research has been led about representation of Black and White masculinities in this segregated context. This master thesis studies what happens when White and Black males are equally casted as main characters in contemporary sitcoms by offering a case-study of the 2011 sitcom New Girl (2011-2017). How is Black masculinity represented in New Girl, and in which ways does it intersect with contemporary societal issues (e.g. racial profiling, Black Lives Matter movement)? This case-study uses tools, methodologies and concepts, drawn from Black and Intersectional feminism as well as Feminist media studies. Based on a 25 episodes sample of the show, it implements Ronald Jackson’s traditional stereotypes classification and “Black masculine identity theory” (Jackson, 2006) to study representations of Black masculinity in New Girl, through its two main Black male characters, Winston and Coach. Given that representations of minorities in popular culture reflect and influence our contemporary society, the results offer new insights about how sitcoms, series and popculture productions in general can challenge traditional stereotypes and display a more progressive Black masculinity.

Russian imperial and Soviet legacies still haunt many nations, and in many places elements of the Soviet and even Tsarist legacy are live political issues. This chapter provides an insight into the Circassian case that clearly demonstrates how the colonial history has been transformed into a neocolonial present. It discusses how Circassians, the indigenous people of the Northwestern Caucasus, are still reliving all sorts of trauma associated with Russian/Soviet imperialism and attempt to deconstruct the colonial discourse that marginalized or completely silenced them by falsifying or denying them their history and identity. Only in the post-Soviet period, Circassians started the process of reconnecting, remembering, reimagining, and reconceptualizing their identities. But, the struggle for historical truth in the North Caucasus is still ongoing and manifests itself in a clash between the official Soviet/Russian version of history that stubbornly insists on the old imperialist myths and the “counter memory” of Circassians who started to actively object to the ideologically motivated falsifications of their history. The subversive counter-discourse that undermines the imperial legacy is most strongly pronounced in literature and art of contemporary Circassian women-writers, artists, and activists.

As practitioners of gender-open parenting, the refusal to impose a gendersex identity on children, my interviewee/collaborator and I engage in a dialogic interview about our shared embodied, everyday, relational parenting practices. I ask: What do we do when we do gender-open parenting? What does gender-open parenting do?

If Marquis Bey and their black trans feminist theory set the scene, Sara Ahmed provides me with the concepts to move the methodology toward an abolitionist phenomenology beyond resistance to cisgender ideology.

In my analysis, I find that because language makes people, suspending and refusing cisnormative interpellations opens us to processes of desedimentation and incorporation of alternative modes of relating. Yet, in doing so, we stumble on the stickiness of words, and by stumbling we make others stumble: we disrupt the flow that keeps us in line with the family as the fundamental unit of time.

I also find that gender-open parenting allows itself to be framed by different frameworks (gendersex abolitionist and expansionist) that carry different promises. I find that the abolitionist promise as presence turns the emptiness of promises into a liberatory feature, making room for the possibility of alternative possibilities. As such, stumbling out-of-line of the family line means also letting chance happen, rejecting the modern/colonial need to know and categorize, and welcoming the unknown.

This thesis is an invitation to gender-open parenting practitioners to refuse to pass on to children the liberal promises of recognition and inclusion in cisnormative racial capitalism and to answer the coalitionary nonnormative calls for gendersex and family abolition.

This thesis uncovers and investigates the colonial affective orientations that oppose queer Sámi sovereignty in Sápmi-Sweden. I draw on theoretical frameworks from queer and trans Indigenous studies and Sara Ahmed’s theories of orientation—specifically, the directedness of feelings and affects shaping embodied ways of valuing, meaning-making, and relating to lifeworlds. Through an anticolonial affective textual analysis, I trace how these orientations sediment in systemic and infrastructural practices. I demonstrate how they function to secure settler futures, or produce and naturalize settler spatiotemporal formations, by examining the entanglement of Euro-gendering and familism with science (Linnaeus and eugenics), Christianity (Laestadius), and the nation-state (Folkhem). My positionality as a white gender-nonconforming settler informs my approach, as I work to suspend my desires to know and extract from Indigeneity while navigating and unlearning colonial cis-heteronormative frameworks. In the analysis, I find that settler colonial orientations direct affects and emotions in ways that subjectivize, discipline, and exploit bodies and lands. These orientations reflect a need, desire, and patronizing imperative to domesticate and cultivate the ungendered and immature body land. Settler colonial relations are normalized and perpetuated through vocational duties to align with heteropatriarchal family structures. In parallel, the settler colonial aim to eliminate Indigenous peoples and indigenize whiteness is sustained by an unrelenting quest for racialized and ableist gender/sexual purity. Ultimately, these affective orientations naturalize settler colonialism through a system of promises and non-promises: the promise of security of familial love to productive members of society and the non-promise of exploitation to the unproductive. When interrogating how Christianization, eugenics, and national-productivist welfare converge to render settler colonialism invisibilized in Sweden, eugenic and settler colonial biopolitical ideologies emerge as irremediably interlocked. The specter of eugenics continues to haunt settler-Sámi relations, urging further investigation into settler colonial affective economies while also acknowledging the orientations that nurture queer Sámi resurgence and sovereignty.

The 9th issue of the Stockholm Review of Latin American Studies brings together the work of five prominent young researchers who examine and discuss different kinds of contemporary struggles in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Uruguay.

This issue’s articles are based on the findings of recently published doctoral dissertations in anthropology and media studies:

Silje Lundgren’s anthropological analysis of the practice of piropos – catcalling, compliments and comments addressed by men to women in Havana street interactions – sheds light on everyday gender struggles, male homosocial communication and the performance of masculinity.

Raúl Marquéz Porras investigates strategies for the solution of everyday conflicts around property rights in an informally occupied neighborhood on the outskirts of the city of Salvador, northeastern Brazil.

Virginia Melián examines the journalistic practices for reporting on the protests against the construction of pulp-mills and the monoculture of trees, taking place between 2005-2009, on both sides of the borders between Argentina and Uruguay.

Maria Padrón Hernández discusses the concept of poverty and the political implications of a poverty discourse as she describes and analyzes the everyday struggles of her Cuban informants in order to make ends meet.

Last but not least, Susann Ullberg examines flooding in the region of Santa Fe, Argentina. Ullberg analyzes how practices of memory and oblivion of past flood experiences clash and collide within the Santafesian public administration.

The present issue was partially funded by a grant from Granholms stiftelse to finance the project “Independence and Dependence in Latin America, 200 years later.” In this sense, it completes and dialogues with the 2012’s issue of the journal which also forms part of this project (SRLAS No. 8, 2012, ¿Lenguas independientes? Independent languages?) by offering a contemporary perspective on new forms of dependencies and new struggles for independencies in Latin America. Enjoy your reading!

In this study I aim to contribute to the field of feminist corpomaterial intersectional pedagogies, which I understand as a part of the broader field of feminist postconstructionist pedagogies. Against the background of feminist postconstructionism I wish to overcome binary understandings of for example discourse/materiality, theory/practice, male/female and mind/body in pedagogies. To follow this through I have analysed how affects and emotions are present in a classroom by studying the possibility of taking a starting point in the body while rethinking the anti-oppressive and norm critical pedagogical idea of the self-reflective teacher. In order to challenge the idea of the teacher as a neutral, universal and rational knowledge producer, I have in this study analysed how one can affectively and emotionally situate teacher-bodies and participant-bodies in a classroom.

The analysis was carried out on the basis of empirical material collected at a workshop on corporeality and norm critical pedagogy organised in a teacher-training program at a Swedish university. The workshop was conducted as intra-active-research and the material consists of my field diary, eight written interviews, one oral interview and my experiences from leading the workshop. I argue in this study that teacher-bodies affectively and emotionally could be situated as both following a corporeal schema, an expected plan for how a teacher-body should act and move, and also as stepping away from and disrupting this schema. Further on I argue that teacher-bodies could be situated as memory banks and as working from memory. I stress how important it is in pedagogic situations to be aware of the ways in which bodies in a room affect and are affected by each other, in other words; how bodies “do not end at the skin”. This affective and emotional situatedness shows how it is possible to overcome the idea of teachers and students as bodily neutral. I also argue that it might be important to integrate workshops on corporealities in teacher training. This could be one possible way to start to think on one’s affectively and emotionally situatedness as teacher, something I claim as required if one aspires for a feminist intersectional corpomaterial pedagogy. 

This paper contributes knowledge on the effects of materiality and space on teaching and equal access to teacher education. Through an intersectional analysis, with a specific focus on orientations, bodies and materiality, we show how student-bodies orientate closer to or further from various parts of teacher education as an effect of the materiality of emergency remote vs. on-campus education. We elaborate on three different student-body orientating processes that take place during teacher education. These are all related to the emergency remote education implemented as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We call these processes ‘remote education as relief’, ‘the embodiedness of raising the hand on Zoom’ and ‘energy-draining pre-recorded lectures’. We show how the materiality of emergency-remote education orientates the participants situated within the bodily horizons of intersectional positions of being deaf, female, racialized as non-white and not having Swedish as a first language, both closer to and further away from various parts of their teacher education. The analysis is based on both individual and group interviews with twelve teacher students. The paper contributes insights to emergency-remote education, remote education and on-campus educating. 

I akademin är det vanligt att man högtidlighåller och firar framstående och seniora professorer som fyller jämt genom att författa en vänbok. Jag har i min egen bokhylla flera sådana volymer och de har alla det gemensamt att kollegor eller andra som står jubilaren nära har författat ett kapitel eller avsnitt. Temat för boken brukar vara ett särskilt vetenskapligt fält, en fråga eller en metod som ligger födelsedagsbarnet varmt om hjärtat. På så sätt visar man professorn sin uppskattning och tecknar i viss mån hans eller hennes vetenskapliga värv. Det du nu håller i din hand är just en sådan vänbok men av ett litet annat slag. Jubilaren i det här fallet är nämligen inte en person, inte någon framstående forskare och professor. Jubilaren som tillägnas denna bok är en mycket speciell organisation i det akademiska landskapet och heter Forum för genusvetenskap och jämställdhet. Anledningen till att vi författat denna vänbok är att Forum som inrättning vid Linköpings universitetfyllt 25 år och vi vill på detta sätt hylla vår vän!

As we are living through a transformative response to a viral pandemic, this think piece suggests a reimagining of the environmental humanities in the open-ended inventories of feminist posthumanities and the low trophic registers of the oceanic. Sea farming of low trophic species such as seaweeds and bivalves is still underexplored option for the mitigation of climate change and diminishing species diversity in the warming oceans of the world. The affordances of low trophic mariculture for coastal life and for contributing to society’s transition into climate aware practices of eating, socializing and thinking is here considered, and showcased as an example of the practical uses of feminist environmental posthumanities.

 Koningin Christina van Zweden ging in de 17e eeuw haar eigen gang. Lapte de verwachtingen van haar 'als vrouw' aan haar laars en was ook nog eens een toonaangevende intellectueel. Maar ze had ook een zeer lage dunk van datgene wat -typisch vrouwelijk- was en gaf bovendien vrijwillig haar macht op. Even slikken voor wie haar graag als recalcitrante koningin in het hart had gesloten. Maar toch een inspirerend rolmodel.

Den här boken introducerar några viktiga författare på samtidsaktuella teoriområden. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Serres och Annemarie Mol presenteras i boken, som också innehåller översatta texter av dessa namn. Boken ger en bakgrund till och en överblick över ett område i intensiv teoriutveckling. Här presenteras den så kallade materiella, posthumana eller ontologiska vändningen. Här kartläggs grunderna för olika posthumanistiska förhållningssätt till de både mänskliga och icke-mänskliga (djur, miljö, teknik) krafterna i vår värld så som de begreppsliggjorts inom filosofi, feministisk teori, kulturstudier och samhällsvetenskapliga studier av naturvetenskap, medicin och teknik. Genom lästips och en omfattande litteraturlista öppnar boken för fortsatta studier och vidare diskussioner. Avslutningsvis finns också en omfattande ordlista med viktiga nyckelbegrepp som i sig ger en introduktion till ett heterogent forskningsfält. Boken riktar sig till studenter, doktorander och andra nyfikna forskare inom olika tvärvetenskapliga eller disciplinära former av humaniora och samhällsvetenskap.

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere”

(Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937)  

The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity (in for instance my own “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). 

Myself, I will explore a couple of “alien species” in these waters, ranging cannisters of mustard gas to Pacific oysters and other storied bodies out of order, so to try to provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality. 

Adopting the "companion species" approach of Haraway—a grappling with charged bits of life—the ordinary story of my own relationships with an adopted mix-breed dog, "Blackie Lawless" assists my understanding in this essay. It makes the connection clear between Haraway’s cyborg concept, a a subspecies of her new, more comprehensive kin figuration of ‘‘companion species’’. Both are figures of lively ontology and ways of knowing within dynamic emergences of their times. As developed in Haraway's book, When Species Meet, ‘‘companion species’’ anchors a form of reluctant post-humanist approach that aims, not to discard anything related to humans, but to think people (and, to practice the humanities) differently. Haraway makes an argument for interspecies survival. In the following I offer my reading of When Species Meet, my bits and bites of sensation, frustration, and curiosity within Haraway’s dog land. Moreover, I also read Haraway in the light of three decades of feminist struggles to come to terms with the body, with biology, and with more-than human existences. I believe these struggles to be crucial for the future survival and proliferation of feminist scholarship, in terms of feminist forms of post-humanities as more humane and more-than-human humanities.

Cecilia Åsberg’s documentation of the coastal “wrack zone” in Scandinavia pays close attention to histories of militarization near Gotland and the convergence of leftover munitions alongside seaweeds that have been washed ashore, also on the Swedish westcoast. Åsberg describes a picturesque coastal background where “bony white and gray rock meet brown algae and the hope of finding amber” against decades of industrial, often military, waste, ranging from World War leftovers of munitions and mustard gas to agricultural fertilizers. Swayed by the seaweeds themselves through modes of writing that reflect drifts in attention at field sites along Scandinavian coastlines, or finding solidarity with seaweeds against extractive or colonial regimes, this piece aims to story sea-side exposures beyond damage narratives. 

In this essay to the section Crossing Boundaries of OA journal Technoscienza, I discuss the plethora of interdisciplinary approaches to the present world troubles from the prism offered by Donna J Haraway's concept of the cyborg and the situated knowledges ensuing in its wake.  

  "Concepts up for discussion: On the concept of genus in Swedish Gender Studies"

This article concerns a lively conceptual debatethat took place in Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift (Swedish Journal of Women's Studies) between 1980-1998. When Yvonne Hirdman, a Swedish historian, in 1988 introduced the concepts of gender and gender system in KVT (in Swedish: genus and genussystem), this sparked off intense discussions and caused theoretical divisions within Swedish feminism. Opinions were divided on the direction that one believed feminist theory should take. Should one strive for something like a new Grand Theory on women's subordination or should the aspirations be somewhat smaller?In this article the author illustrates the shifting emphases in the journal on such theoretical problems as essentialism versus social constructivism and agents of change versus stabile structures -perspectives. The article also takes into account the new challenges that different theories of a more or less postmodern nature put forward, for instance sexual difference theory. The ongoing feminist theoretical developmenthas included an expansion, both in terms of a broadening of the investigatory horizon and research delving deeper into various fields. Nowadays Women's Studies is part of the larger field of Gender Studies. Genus, today, signifies the growing amount of knowledge about sex and gender,femininity and masculinity, and is often conceptualized,not as a system, but as an ongoing identity forging process of historically changing ideas.

Jag menar att feministisk forskning står mitt i en posthumanistisk utmaning. När människor idag på ett alltmer uppenbart sätt är invävda i komplexa relationer till teknik, medicin och naturvetenskap, till andra djur, omgivning och miljö, skakas humanismens teorier om mänsklighetens villkor och etik, liksom dess exkluderande biopolitik, om ordentligt. Humanvetenskapernas omfång och räckvidd har också utmanats. Från det inre av ämnen som filosofi, historia och litteraturvetenskap har genusforskning tillsammans med cultural studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, science and literature studies sprungit fram och bidragit med grundläggande ifrågasättanden av humanioras studieobjekt, studiesubjekt, disciplinära normer, kunskapsregimer och maktrelationer. Humaniora är en mäktig traditionsbevarare, men också samtidigt en vital plats för kritik och uppfinningsrikedom. Det är en plats grogrund för ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv med utgångspunkt i feministisk teori.

A wealth of contemporary speculative practices on how to deal with life, death, and co-existence on a planet haunted by pandemics, mass species extinctions, climate change, and rampant societal injustice are currently circulating, in public — in academia, in art, and in activism. Existential concerns, what the humanities are well-equipped to handle, and new insights are sought after in public. So how can the humanities respond well? For instance to the normative notions of the human that make some people more killable than others (like the elderly COVID-patients in Swedish nursing homes, black men in the US, born or unborn girls in very poor communities, refugees in camps, indigenous environmental activists in the global South). How can the humanities make themselves, to use a term from Donna Haraway, respons-able for how a ‘normative human’ has also shaped the planet into such an inhabitable or even toxic place for many others? One answer, a well-trodden path by now, are the feminist posthumanities, and how they together (as environmental humanities, medical humanities, decolonial humanities, queer humanities, technohumanities, posthuman or multispecies humanities) question the exclusions and inclusions made in the name of the human and the humanities. Here theory meets practice, science meets art, and a transformational sense of humanity meets the people.   

Den här boken introducerar några viktiga författare på samtidsaktuella teoriområden. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Serres och Annemarie Mol presenteras i boken, som också innehåller översatta texter av dessa namn. Boken ger en bakgrund till och en överblick över ett område i intensiv teoriutveckling. Här presenteras den så kallade materiella, posthumana eller ontologiska vändningen. Här kartläggs grunderna för olika posthumanistiska förhållningssätt till de både mänskliga och icke-mänskliga (djur, miljö, teknik) krafterna i vår värld så som de begreppsliggjorts inom filosofi, feministisk teori, kulturstudier och samhällsvetenskapliga studier av naturvetenskap, medicin och teknik. Genom lästips och en omfattande litteraturlista öppnar boken för fortsatta studier och vidare diskussioner. Avslutningsvis finns också en omfattande ordlista med viktiga nyckelbegrepp som i sig ger en introduktion till ett heterogent forskningsfält. Boken riktar sig till studenter, doktorander och andra nyfikna forskare inom olika tvärvetenskapliga eller disciplinära former av humaniora och samhällsvetenskap.

We are currently witnessing a genuine proliferation of new feminist or pro-feminist work on posthumanities, in art and research, in Sweden as in other corners of the world. What matters most to me as a feminist scholar is the synergy and new conversations within feminist theory, and what they can do. Reinventing the humanities today can no longer signify the relaunching of a school of thought, style, or theory with a hegemonic vocation. It must entail the very recomposition of disciplinarity, theory, and everyday doing. Feminist posthumanities testify not to any crisis of the content, rigor, or intellectual liveliness of the humanities and adjacent social sciences, but to its sociability in the more-than-human domains. Feminist posthumanities, with its mixed origin stories and foremothers, are to me the becoming minoritarian of collective academic insight, and it comes with both its perks (great networking, new experiences, fun, failures, and situated insights), and setbacks (this type of research is not easily funded, often short-lived, and project-based). It is needed more now than ever, as we need communities that work together, across the ecologies and technologies of the postnatural condition we often simply call the Anthropocene.

In this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or "rotifers," emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research (and others) might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

Vår tids stora fråga rör handling, vad en kan göra när nästan all form av handling framstår som besudlad eller oren? Vilka är möjligheterna  för tanke och handling i en anda av samexistens i splittrad värld? Inom litteraturvetenskaperna har ekokritiken definierat ett brett område som snabbt etablerat en uppsjö teoretiska positioner. Ekokritiska metoder har också påverkat näraliggande forskningsämnen och varit viktiga för etableringen av nyhumanioran som erbjuds inom ramen för miljöorienterad humaniora, environmental humanities. Miljö- och hållbarhetsfrågor som samhället brottas med idag gör ekokritisk kreativitet än mer aktuell. I mitt efterord till boken Ekokritiska metoder emfaserar jag ekokritikens roll och relation inom miljöhumaniora och samtidsdebatt. Jag pekar mot en kreativ-skapande-görande approach till berättande som gör ekokritik till en mer än mänsklig angelägenhet i en värld som snabbt förändras och som behöver lika snabbt föränderliga analysansatser. Mer än mänsklig humaniora (posthumaniora), ekokritik, ekofeminismer och miljöhumaniora omarbetar frentetiskt - och i samarbeten - idag vår självsyn och kulturella berättelser för att bättre fungera med en splittrad och skadad värld. Den går från ord till handling.      

The cyborg is a figure we now easily connect with early 1990s feminist technoscience studies,indeed it is a foundational figure of the field. However, cyborgs do not just trace older, but also a lot more ambiguous and less feminist roots within our technoscientific modernity. Theaim of this article is to provide a genealogical map of feminist entanglements with especiallythe biological sciences and with the body. In particular, I aim here to show how the figure of the cyborg in fact might be positioned as the first sign materializing and anticipating what wetoday might call the ontological turn within feminist theory and technoscience studies.

This chapter, on the oceanic and seaweed work of artist Signe Johannessen, explores extra-disciplinarity in the registers of art, philososphy and science in order to outline the emerging arts of sustainability for learning to live better on a damaged planet.  

In lieu of an abstract.

This chapter describes the watery and sea side works of Scandinavian artist Signe Johannessen, especially her work on kelp, sea weed and oceanic arts. 

This glossary entry describes what feminist posthumanities may entail.

In the new planetary age of the Anthropocene or the Age of Man (as it were), humanity is cast as a single geological force, a major force of environmental destruction, and one folding in on itself. The Anthropocene is famously defined by human-induced climatic, biological, and geological transformations of our planet, by a profound anthropogenic environmental impact and mass species extinctions. However, the Anthropocene risk also, as pointed out by a wide range of feminist philosophers and critical scholars, to hide troublesome differences between humans, and also to hide intimate relationships between technology, humans, and other animals. This totalization of humanity is a parallel risk in some posthuman theorizing also, and something postdisciplinary scholars of the critical humanities and feminist philosophers have paid attention to for decades. In the posthuman context of the Anthropocene, I suggest and point to postdisciplinary humanities research and theory-practices that pay careful attention to the feminist theoretical work on our equally postnatural condition as an experimental remedy.

Review of the dissertation Figures of Fantasy. Women, Cyberdiscourse and the Popular Internet, by Susanna Paasonen, Turku, Finland.

 Unpublished conference paper. 

This study investigates how representations of genes and genetics have given rise to new kinds of cultural imageries created and reflected in popular science media. The concept of popular/science is used here in order to circumvent the traditional diffusion model of science communication, and to focus instead on how popular science media taps into scientific discourse just as scientific representations draw on popular imagery. The study thus shows how the new genetics is not created in a cultural vacuum, but thrives in the intersection of popular culture and science culture. The main argument is that together with the changing genetic imageries in popular/science both conventional and unconventional ways of enacting gender, sexuality and race emerge. Thus the illustrations and stories assembled and analysed here can be regarded as contested sites of social change.

This exploration of contemporary representations of genes and genetics is performed with analytical tools from the overlappmg fields of feminist cultural studies, visual studies, and science and literature studies. As the ways of representing genes and generics in the visual field of popular science media are mapped out, the thesis gives a partial and local account of the mosaic of the genetic imaginary - a discursive fantasy landscape which is used as a resource for collective subject formations, and in which cultural communities mirror and articulate themselves.

 Editor's introduction to special issue on "Genetiske forestillinger".

Thematic issue - on representations of the new genetics and our shared social imaginary around genes and genetics (ed. Cecilia Åsberg)  - of the Danish scholarly journal Kvinder, køn og forskning (Danish journal of gender studies) 

 I samband med Bengt Olle Bengtssons publikation (2006), ett symposion med samma namn, Genetiska konflikter, där ett flertal forskare presenterade kritiska perspektiv på genetiken. 

This piece introduces the broad research topic of gender and technology.

This chapter (in Dutch) introduces the feminist figuration of the cyborg and feminist science studies perspectives on biology.

 Documentation of the conference Utopias and dystopias, October 2000, celebration of Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift 20 years.

 Unpublished conference paper.  

Vision has often been a central concern of feminist studies of science, medicine and technology. In cultural or social feminist analysis, the male gaze and the ways in which technoscience accommodates, and in effect organizes the watching of women, has been an important part of the feminist interrogation of the gender and power relations that produce the subjects and the objects of science. This attention is due to the intimate, and power-saturated, merge of processes of seeing and processes of knowing. Inherent in the notion of vision, there is always a politics to ways of seeing, ordering and observing, of organising the knowledge of the world. Historically, this can be exemplified by the eighteen-century Swedish “father” of biological classification, Linnaeus. Taking a leap away from Christian assumptions, Linnaeus placed human beings in a taxonomic order of nature together with other animals.

Detta bokkapitel ger en inledning till en viktig perpektivförskjutning inom humaniora och samhällsvetenskap och till de posthumanistiska perspektiv som utvecklats under flera decennier inom olika forskningsområden utifrån post-disciplinära och post-konstruktionistiska utgångspunkter.