What is the future of humanity? What does it mean to be ‘human’ in the posthuman age? What responsibility does humankind have towards others and their environments? How are the stories that humans tell themselves implicated in the very power asymmetries and eco-political challenges that they bemoan? Taking a cross-disciplinary approach to the posthuman age, the essays in this collection speak to the multifaceted geographies and counter-geographies of humanity, probing into the possible futures we face as planetary species. Some of these include: ecological issues generated by centuries of neglecting our environment(s); power asymmetries stemming from economic and cultural globalization; violence and its affective politics informed by cultural, ethnic, and racial genocides; religious disputes; social inequities produced by consumerism; gender normativity; and the increasing impact of digital and AI (artificial intelligence) technology on the human body, as well as historical, socio-political, not to mention ethical relations.
Pavlina Radia is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science and Professor in English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada. She is also Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences at Nipissing University. She is the author of Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles: “Two Very Serious Ladies” (2016) and Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature (2016). She is also a co-editor of Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts with Ann McCulloch (2012).
Sarah Fiona Winters is Associate Professor in English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada. Her research focuses on the representations of evil in post-war children’s fantasy and on the relationship of fandom studies to digital pedagogies. She has published articles on C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Margaret Mahy.
Laurie Kruk is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada. She has published The Voice Is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (2003) and Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story (2016). She has also published three collections of poetry: Theories of the World (1992), Loving the Alien (2006), and My Mother Did Not Tell Stories (2012).