Posthuman Methodologies for Post-Industrial Cities: A Situated, Speculative, and Somatechnic Venture

Abstract

This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, but actively emerge through entanglements and in co-constitutive relation with one another. Such an attentiveness recognises that we are shaped by the places in which we live and by the many others – human and nonhuman – with whom we live. It also urges the need to reshape research methodologies. To illuminate how we might more closely attend to the places in which we live, learn, teach, inquire, and research, this article offers a series of situated, speculative, and somatechnic engagements arising from our recent ventures in two separate post-industrial cities. The article is framed as a mode of writing otherwise – as a series of experimental elemental essays and the theory-practice diffractive musings they have given rise to. Taken together, the essays and musings aim to contest deficit discourses of post-industrial cities and the multiple bodies who / which inhabit them. The posthuman situated and speculative somatechnics approach we propose offers insights into unexpected and surprising new relations. We hope the elemental essays and musings which follow invite readers to take up the ‘practice of the pause’ in their own places and spaces.