The Posthumanities Hub
The Posthumanities Hub is a research group and a multi-university platform for more-than-human humanities, of many kinds. Environmental humanities, citizen humanities, multispecies humanities, oceanic-/ medical-/energy-/techno-/bio- humanities, you name it. As long as it traffics the imagined (Euromodern) divides of nature and culture, academia and society, and it extends the democratic impulse and the ethos of conviviality beyond the narrow frame of Man, we are in!
The Posthumanities Hub is an incubator of new humanities and more-than-human humanities, and a feminist “collaboratory” for symbiotic art, arts and science networks aiming to build-bridges and create new alliances. A haven for guest researchers (we welcome self-funded visitors on location) and practices of posthumanities, and simply, a testing ground for new shared ideas on how to co-exist, work and think better together in a troubled world.
Bringing science and art to the humanities, the Posthumanities Hub has been a transformational force of the societally relevant, extra-disciplinary, super-networked, new humanities in Sweden and beyond since 2008. Over the years, we have combined philosophy, arts and sciences with extrovert forms of new humanities, with laboratory studies, academic activism and a far-reaching societal committment to democracy and co-existential ethics in multispecies practice. Prof Cecilia Åsberg and her Hub introduced feminist new materialisms, cyborg- or technohumanities, bio-/eco art and citizen humanities, medical and environmental humanities in the Swedish-international scene by way of feminist curiosity, critique, creativity and extra-academic collaboration. And large doses of science and technology studies mixed with feminist theory and its postconventional ethos of imagining how things could be done differently.
The Hub was founded by Professor Cecilia Åsberg at Linköping University (LiU) in 2008 within the LiU Future Research Leader’s program as Åsberg’s research group and a feminist humanities lab. Alumni, like Astrida Neimanis, Olga Cielemecka, Marietta Radomska, Lina Rahm and Janna Holmstedt, speaks for the stellar career trajectories of postdoctoral researchers of Åsberg and the capacity building of The Posthumanities Hub. The Hub was originary source for the Swedish environmental humanities program The Seed Box (MISTRA and FORMAS) 2013-2017. KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm hosted Åsberg’s guest professorship and the whole Hub in 2018- spring 2021. Now we are back at LiU and re-connected to the Gender, nature, culture platform of Åsberg’s LiU chair. So rooted, yet the Hub flows …
Presently it flows in the directions of OsloMet University (Åsberg’s international Prof II position) and KTH SEED (Sustainable Development and Environmental Engineering Department). However, the Posthumanities Hub remains a “zoo of posthumanities” (Halberstam & Livingston 1995:3), a home away from home for queer eco-feminist, creative and critical scholars from various corners of the world, across many universities and disciplines.
The Posthumanities Hub, an incubator of ideas and inventive scholary practices, hosts webinars, funded projects (eg Wallenberg, VR, Formas projects) and guest researchers and mushrooming sub-groups like Eco- and Bioart Lab (Director Dr Marietta Radomska) and Humus Economicus (Director Dr Janna Holmstedt).
Contact Prof Cecilia Åsberg [cecilia.asberg AT liu.se] for more information on the core team, the research group (a “collaboratory”) and the Hub’s wider affiliated networks (eg Posthumanities International Network), and sister groups around the world
Our Points of Exit
We bring science and art into the humanities, and more-than-human humanities to the people!
The onto-methodological practices, travelling theories, networked existence and ethos of the Posthumanities Hub – where we bring the trouble “home” – can be strangely recognized in a poem from Ursula Le Guin’s book Always Coming Home. Read her poem and more on Our Points of Exit here >>
Advisory Board
Distinguished Professor Donna Haraway – also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of The Posthumanities Hub – provides an inspiring take on the need for scholars, activists and artists to move beyond humanism, anthropocentrism or what she (and Prof. Anna Tsing) call “human exceptionalism” in this film, view on Vimeo
We proudly present our Scientific Advisory Board here >>
Funding Agencies
Our research projects, events, networks and PhD/postdoc positions have been funded by, amongst others, the European Research Council (ERC StG), The Swedish Research Council (VR), Nordic Research Council for Humanities and Social Science (NOS-HS), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada (SSHRC), The Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas), The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra), Swedish foundation for humanities and social sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, RJ), Åke Wiberg Foundation, Ragnar Holm Foundation, Nordisk Kulturfund, and others Read more here >>