Technobodies in Cyberspace

Information

Course Coordinator: Dr. Kathrin Thiele
ECTS: 7,5

Description

This course explores in both a creative and a critical way the ‘hype’ that surrounds the new technological and digital cultures. It will explore how these new and changing technologies affect our experience and understanding of identity and if and how they are changing our relationship to our bodies. This course will approach identity across a number of social and cultural practices, bodily appearances and sexuality, medical practices, and popular, scientific, and visual cultures. The course will explore how theoretical frameworks can help us understand these new experiences on both global and local levels. It will provide interdisciplinary approaches, and it will raise issues of representation and agency in cyberspace. Through the use of literature, theoretical concepts, and visual material we will do some analytical ‘hacking’ (decoding and encoding) of factual and fictional phenomena such as cyborgs, gendered embodiment, and technoscience in everyday life and popular culture. We will plug into technocultural discourse in our efforts to understand what could be called posthuman(ist) time, space and agency.