ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Answers to questions of how technology impacts definitions of what it means to be human, what is other than human, what constitutes the good, natural and normal for human life and society, and how subjects can constitute, experience and communicate their own otherness through technology vary widely along the spectrum from humanism to posthumanism. At one end are bioconservative responses that suggest a shared and unchanging conception of human nature threatened by scientific and technological advances that alter or enhance human capabilities and functioning. At the other end are posthuman responses that use science and technology as an occasion for the kind of individuation that relativizes and resists humanism’s essentializing ethnocentrism. Papers may include: depictions of the relationship between technology, the human, and its other in literature and film; examples of historical and contemporary technologies and how they push at the boundaries of the human (cloning, prosthetic devices, gene manipulation, etc.); how and why science and technology make defining the human a pertinent concern for us today; and the possibility of a critical theory or ethics of technology based on ideas of what it means to be human vs. obligations to the other, we will address the religious, philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the use of technology to define what is human and what is other than human.

Friday, March 24

Leif Sorenson, University of Georgia
“Future Metaphor or Present Politics? The Contested Site of the Transsexual Body”
Nisha Kunte, University of Southern California
“Doing the Body: Narrative and Ethics in Organ Transplantation”
Shital Pravinchandra, Cornell University
“Dirty Pretty Things,” or The Commoditization of the Third World Body through Transplant Technology”
Tamar Sharon, Bar Ilan University
“Biotechnology at the Barricades: On the Celebration of Biotechnology as Political Resistance in Contemporary Postmodern Philosophy”

Saturday, March 25

Christina Lake, Wheaton College
“I Don’t Want to Play Anymore”: Galatea 2.2 and our Posthuman Fictions”
Regina Yung, University of Alberta
“R/evolution: mechanization of the agent of change”
Dennis Weiss, York College of Pennsylvania
“(De)Naturalizing the Cyborg: Science Meets (Feminist) Sci Fi”
Caleb Smith, Yale University
“Modernity Shocks: Gender, Technology, and the Limits of the Human, circa 1900”

Sunday, March 26

Michael Graziano, Northwestern University
“On Call With Distraction: Telephony, Mobility and the Technological Uncanny”
Robin Zebrowski, University of Oregon
“The Body’s Revision – The Revelation of Humanity Through Technology”
Brett Martz, University of Virginia
“A Cybernetic Self? - Reproduction and the Soul in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Automata”
Brian Thill, University of California, Irvine
“The Imperatives of Futurity: Marge Piercy, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Politics”