Inside Higher Ed conducted an email interview with Sidonie A. Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, about her new book, Manifesto for the Humanities.
The question from editor Scott Jaschik was: “What is the ‘possibly posthuman humanities scholar’ and how does this idea relate to doctoral education?”
Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms,” bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.
“Prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality?” (It isn’t April 1, is it?)