Being one and many | Online International Conference | 9-10 March 2021
The emerging cyborgs, transhumans and posthumans call for an urgent reconsideration of humans as individuals and collectives. The identity of the human in the 21st century eludes the constraining boundaries of definitions underpinned by simplifying and simplified dichotomies. Affecting all the spheres of life, the discoveries and achievements of recent decades have challenged the bipolar categorizations of human and nonhuman, human and animal, or even human and machine, and thus opened the door to transdisciplinary considerations.
Ours is a new world where the boundaries of normality and abnormality, a legacy of the long history of philosophy, medicine, science and art, need dismantling, and where the concept of normality as the basis of our vision of the world is obsolete. All orders are contingent, and pathologies are often produced in and through our excessive quest for normalization. Now we are on our way to re-examine, re-understand, and re-describe what normal-abnormal, human-nonhuman, and I-we-they mean. We find ourselves facing what resembles the liminal stage of a global ritual, a stage of being in-between – between the old anthropocentric order and a new position of “being many”. The collective mode of thinking requires changes in the production of knowledge. Transdisciplinarity and learning from various fields of knowledge can help us to understand and adjust to the dynamic in which we are plunged.
Our conference will be dedicated to discussing the new ideas of the human. We will ponder the ways in which contemporary art, natural science, and philosophy transcend the binary concepts of human-nonhuman, natural-artificial, individual-collective, and normal-abnormal.
Photo: P. Jóźwiak
is an artist (2009 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Department of Visual Arts) and researcher, PhD student (Nature-Culture Transdisciplinary PhD Program at Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw). Working in a laboratory (mostly at the Institute of Genetics and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw) locates her works in the field of bio art, although she tries to avoid using this term. She sees her liminal activity as situated knowledge production. She is mostly focused on life in its broad understanding (its biological and cultural meaning). Her projects have mostly conceptual, critical character. The main point of her research interest are multilevel relations emerging during realization of liminal projects. She tries to put her observations, as an artist/researcher (liminal being), in the context of Science and Technology Studies (STS) Actor-Network Theory by Bruno Latour and feminist humanities.
currently postgraduate student of bioethics at Warsaw University. His research in the fields of psychiatry and neurology focus on the ethical issues they generate. He works on social and bioethical context of the use of virtual reality in psychiatry, concentrating on Avatar Therapy in the treatment of drug-resistant auditory hallucinations experienced by people with schizophrenia.
is a graduate of Medicine and Philosophy with a Ph.D. in philosophy from University of Łódź, Poland. Assistant Professor at the Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Lodz.
Her academic interests focus on bioethics and phenomenology, especially on phenomenology of embodiment, philosophical and ethical issues concerning human enhancement, philosophical thanatology and bioethical end-of-life issues, and on the analysis of gender stereotypes in bioethical and medical discourses.
Habilitated Doctor, Assistant Professor at the Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Łódź, Poland. Her research focuses on bioethical aspects of reproductive medicine, feminist approaches to issues such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, embryo, gamete and mitochondrial donation, as we as human enhancement and cross disciplinary perspectives (bioethics/film studies/cultural studies/body, bio and cyborg art) on dying, ageing, and embodiment.