Non Humans In Social Science

The book explores the issue of non-humans and their role and position within contemporary social sciences. Inspired by current trends of bridging the dichotomy of nature and culture, the authors use the “non-human“ as a prism that offers a different perspective of the world, society, culture, and last but not least, being(s). To start paying attention to non-humans has the potential to hybridize social sciences and in turn enrich them as well as to offer social scientists novel perspectives and tools to approach social phenomena. Such an attitude might in turn lead to a reassessment of understanding of the relationship between the world and being, and of the categories of being and subject. Hence the potential of non-humans to stimulate an ontological shift within social sciences. The view of the “human” and “non-human” as oppositional categories is a remnant of essentially modernist thinking. This book represents a response in terms of an attempt to think about humans and non-humans outside of the binary division. The authors thus want to contribute to the hybridization of social sciences and throughout the book they deal with ontological, epistemological and thematical shifts stemming from the hybridization. If the non-human does not exist as a negation, the boundary between the two becomes unclear and overlapping. It is with this hybridization, the blurring of the boundaries, that we are able to come closer to those who inhabit the world: non-humans and humans alike.

The robots are coming! So too is the ‘age of automation’, the march of ‘invasive’ species, more intense natural disasters, and a potential cataclysm of other unprecedented events and phenomena of which we do not yet know, and cannot predict. This book is concerned with how to account for these non-humans and their effects within theories of social practice. In particular, this provocative collection tackles contemporary debates about the roles, relations and agencies of constantly changing, disruptive, intelligent or otherwise 'dynamic' non-humans, such as weather, animals and automated devices. In doing so contributors challenge and take forward existing understandings of dynamic non-humans in theories of social practice by reconsidering their potential roles in everyday life. The book will benefit sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and human- (and animal-) computer interaction design scholars seeking to make sense of the complex entanglement of non-human phenomena and things in the performance of social practices.

Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman. Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U.

Ideas of dead, inert space, non-living, machinelike reflexive controlled bodies and passive, meaningless things are very modern. At the very heart of the program of modernity, resource exploitation and consumption is the idea that non-humans have no agency – they are simply resources to be manipulated and exploited at our will. Mostly leaving aside the more and more evident ethical concerns of this worldview and this setting of the human – non-human boundary, this volume attempts to explore what social sciences have to say about the relationship between the human and non-human. The intention of this book is to offer a non-human perspective. We realize that it is sometimes difficult to say whether the outcome of such a perspective would be just a shallow tendency to anthropomorphize, or whether we could reach some of the previously unseen properties of non-humans. Being aware of the dangers, this volume puts together different case studies that are more or less inspired by this non-human perspective. The aim is to explore what has been for a long time put aside and to provide new insights, new revelations that can lead social science to undiscovered or hidden realms. The outcome of this thrilling adventure can in the end be a discovery that the role of natural and social sciences, or even more, the character of the nature-culture dichotomy would have to be re-evaluated.

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic – the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes.

In this book questions about definitions and demarcations of sport science are discussed. Not the least the many normative ideas of sport as good or as bad are problematized in relation to the academic field. These ideas permeate sport science in ways that are not seen in other academic fields like history, sociology or law. In addition, if and if so, in what ways sport science influence social science in general. Does sport science bring new questions in relation to issues like "what makes a society possible" or "what is a human being"? This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This timely book inspires researchers to deploy relevant, effective, innovative digital methods. It explores the relationship of such methods to 'mainstream' social science; interdisciplinarity; innovations in digital research tools; the opportunities (and challenges) of digital methods in researching social life; and digital research ethics.

"This is the first book to name and consolidate a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways--in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems." -- Publisher's description