PhD Courses

The Posthumanities Hub provides PhD-level courses on a regular basis and functions as a research school. These research courses are very interdisciplinary, very relational and focused on theory, methodology, and the hands-on skills of advanced scholarly research. Some are online, some are hybrid, and some are on-location (for instance, at Linköping University, at a museum, or on the beach).

Unless stated otherwise, PhD-level courses are open to third-cycle/doctoral students enrolled at any university, from any faculty or country, provided that the student fulfils the entry requirements set for each specific course.

Heading the Hub’s research school, Prof Cecilia Åsberg offers the following PhD-level courses at Linköping University (Faculty of Arts and Sciences):

Gender, Nature, Culture: Feminist Posthumanities in Practice (10 credits)
Online and on-location: 16 January, 25 January, 8 February and 8 March (workshops on-location), 22 March and (grande finale) 4 April with presentations. To register for this 2024 PhD course, email: Cecilia Åsberg.

Download syllabus here!

The course provides an introduction into the conceptual landscape of gender, nature, culture, and an orientation into its methodological trajectories across the fields of science and art, and into hands-on practices of feminist posthumanities. Notions of different epistemic traditions in the past and present, and of inter-, post-disciplinary, and extra-academic research are presented and framed. PhD researchers will be provided with the tools to creatively and critically reflect on the challenges and research questions inherent to their own research practices and their own doctoral work in relationship to gender, nature, culture, and feminist posthumanities in practice.

The course introduces participants to feminist thinking on situated knowledge practices and performative, even transformational, research methodologies through (online) lectures and seminars on self-studied course readings, experimental workshops and collaborative teaching and learning approaches.  Peer learning is a crucial component of this course. This course is suitable for PhD-students in Gender Studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, artistic research, environmental humanities, history of science, technology and environment, future studies, eco-critique, and interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. The course roots the students in feminist theory-practices and scholarly traditions of arts and science, and shifts the perspective based in their own doctoral projects.

Gender & Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities (7.5 credits)
An online course taught by a multi-university teacher team. Course responsible are Prof. Meike Schalk (KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm) and Prof Cecilia Åsberg (Linköping University). We will welcome applications for this course next year. – So watch this space for 2025!

Feminist Ethics of Care: Genealogies and Uses from Mothering to Respons-ability (2,5 credits)
This communal reading course runs on demand (with a minimum of 5 registered participants). We meet to discuss the core literature and the chosen literature in depth.

Course period: Flexible, the course is taught on demand, 50% study pace
Language: English
Course content: Link to Syllabus

Joan Tronto, a feminist philosopher and theorist of democracy, defined an ethic of care as any approach to personal, social, moral, and political life that starts from the reality that all human beings need and receive care and give care to others. The care relationships among humans are part of what mark us as human beings, that we always are interdependent and relational beings. (See also the book Dingo Makes Us Human by Deborah Bird Rose).

Early on, Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher defined care widely: “On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” STS and multispecies feminist scholars took this understanding of care to a both local and planetary level, at once. Donna Haraway, keen to not root politics in identity, purity or mothering, introduced the powerful concept of “respons-ability”. This makes care, care work and caring a reciprocal activity of attuning into also to the nonhumans that co-constitute the world, enabling all kinds of responses to the continuous crisis of living in capitalist ruins in the Anthropocene. María Puig de la Bellacasa’s 2017 book Matters of Care, following Haraway’s trajectory of multispecies care, bring together three dimensions of care – as an affective state, a material-doing and practice, and an ethico-political obligation. Architectural theorist Elke Krasny et al’s edited volume, Radicalizing Care, brings together curatorial and creative practices, hacking and design in a multidisciplinary compilation that evidence the versatility of feminist care ethics today. In this course, we read Tronto, Bellacasa, Haraway and selected chapters from Krasny, alongside critiques of feminist ethics of care (as a virtue ethic of individualism and inner self-control) and two individually selected theoretical texts on the topic that suit the research project of the course participants.

Teaching and examination: The joint reading is distributed and individual readings selected before the course start. We then meet for joint zoom reading seminars on two occasions. Course participants are expected to prepare for each joint zoom webinar and to present their own individual reading and take-home message from the joint and from the individually selected readings. The two webinar presentations, one for each seminar, form the basis for examination.

Course coordinator: Cecilia Åsberg

Enrolment: To enrol for the course, contact the course coordinator (cecilia.asbergATliu.se
More information about the course can be found here or here.