A bridge- and capacity building research community at Linköping University, Sweden. The Posthumanities Hub is one of the largest transdisciplinary research groups and platforms for more-than-human humanities in Sweden. The Hub (in short) is hosted by the Gender Studies unit (Tema Genus) at the interdisciplinary Tema Insitute, Linköping University and connected to the chair in Gender, Nature Cultur
e. Since the inauguration of the research group of Cecilia Åsberg in 2008, the Hub has grown and developed into a very tentacular creature. It functions today as unique MULTI-UNIVERSITY platform for interactions across arts, sciences and society. The Posthumanities Hub brings science and art to the humanities, and societally relevant insight to the people! The Hub keeps evolving: it has "mushroomed", networked and hosted funded projects, for instance The Eco- and Bio Art Lab and the Formas-funded soil art group Humus Economicus. In relation to Åsberg's guest professorship at KTH, The Posthumanities Hub was 2018-2021 hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Division of Historical Studies of Science, Technology and Environment. Amongst collaborating partners of the Hub, we find Bonniers Konsthall, Färgfabriken, Bromma Gymnasium, Gnesta Art Lab, Filipstads kommun, the Body Hub and the Seed Box. Corresponding to the diversity within posthumanist gender studies and other forms of more-than-human humanities, "The Hub" provides a collaborative platform for converging research interests, doctoral projects, and scholarly exchanges in the arts and sciences. Research at The Posthumanities Hub share a commitment to:
- the enlivening of trans- or postdisciplinary humanities (and social science) research to exhibit its urgent societal relevance
- critical and creative analytical moves and social movements outside the conventional comfort zones of the humanities
- the re-invention of feminist theory-practice
- the problematization of human-centered research and other oft forgotten basic assumptions (eg, that we in these critical times can no longer afford the luxury of dividing the world in nature and culture, soft and hard sciences, theory and empirical practices)
- sustainable worlding practices, and the re-thinking of humanities (and other sciences) - from within! Through the years our work, on a project-basis, have been funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), FORMAS the Swedish research council for sustainability, MISTRA, Nordic Research Council for Humanities and Social Science, the Swedish Ministry of Higher Education, the European Research Council (ERC), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, EU Cost Action, Åke Wiberg Foundation, and by initiatives of Linköping University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Bonniers Konsthall. Launched in 2008 as the research group of Cecilia Åsberg, the Posthumanities Hub is now much more than that. It is a meeting place for both theoretical and empirical research in/on feminist posthuman theory and gendered biologies, medical humanities and environmental humanites, human animal studies and critical disability studies, STS/SLS, feminist science studies, new media and popular cultures. It is one of the constitutive environments for The Seed Box, the Swedish environmental Humanities research programme (MISTRA and FORMAS), and the gender excellence centre GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, a host of visiting scholars and a platform for projects, networks and collaborations. The Posthumanities Hub hosts many networks, like the Posthumanities International Network (PIN), the Posthumanities Network: The Next Genderation, a Swedish Research Council funded initiative bringing together inter-, trans-, and cross-disciplinary researchers from Sweden, Europe, North America, and Australia. The core research group –consisting of PhD-students (sometimes MA-students) and Postdoctoral candidates, alongside lecturers and professors– meets regularly for networking and research exchange events. Nowadays we host seminar sessions over zoom that are very popular and reach all corners of the world. Cognisant of shifting terrain in the contemporary social sciences and humanities, the Posthumanities Hub engages with critical and creative pursuits that address changing relations between animals, bodies, technologies, and environments from trans/inter-disciplinary perspectives. Posthumanities trace here a feminist genealogy of cyborg anthropology, situated knowledge and sex-gender/nature-culture theorizing. The respective projects of the Posthumanities Hub researchers coalesce at the intersection of epistemology, ontology, and ethics. We meet up with biological, medical and scientific; experimental, educational, and ethical; artistic, environmental and epistemological; technical, digital and ontological challenges from within the expanding, liminal zones of cultural scholarship so to exhibit the critical and creative potentials of contemporary feminist research and show case the societal relevance of the humanities. Director: Cecilia Åsberg, Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture in Gender Studies, Linköping University, KTH Guest Professor in STS, gender and environmental humanities at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre at LMU in München, Germany. Email: [email protected]
Co-Director: Marietta Radomska, Research Fellow in Gender Studies, Linköping University.
