DAY 1 — 14 JANUARY 12:30 – 1:30 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 1: Vegetal Subjectivities
Read Debashish Banerji’s paper
Speaker: Ahana Bhattacharyya
Title: Yeong-Hye becomes a tree: A Posthumanist Study of Han Kang's The Vegetarian
Abstract: "Korean novelist Han Kang in her novel The Vegetarian speaks about the protagonist Yeong-hye gradually dissolving into an arboreal identity. Her initiation takes place with a traumatic dream of slaughter which firstly leads her to redefine her dietary choices. She gives up every animal product actively acknowledging, rather visualising the cruelty involved. This abandonment of cruelty in turn subjects her to face familial cruelty which had not surfaced till then. Her familial alienation triggers the hypersexual desires of her brother-in-law who manages to gratify his long-standing fantasies about her. With Yeong-Hye’s transformed perspective of social ethics, she looks at and uses her body in ways which enables her to wander into an existence that floats away from both the body and mind. Towards the end of the novel, when she had almost given up eating and had turned emaciated, she is curiously found resting on handstand for hours, claiming herself to be tree. The novel ends with Yeong-Hye’s much apprehended death.
Firstly, my paper attempts to study the circuit that generates and imprints ethics in our socio-cultural existence. To look at the global capitalist economics, the consumption choices are seen through a lens that negate the existence of the source while being entirely dependent on it. Therefore posthumanist theory becomes the obvious tool of observation which places human as only one of the nodes in the vast arena of existence. (read full paper)
Keywords: posthuman woman family culture"
Speaker: Tohidur Rahaman
Title: Posthuman Existentiality of “Weeds” and “Plants” in Gardening Citizenship: Examining Relationality of Arrangement and Displacement through Photographic Practices
Abstract: 2. Paper for Practical Seminar
Gardening can serve as a space for posthuman existential inquiry to understand and develop human and more-than-human relationships. However, the arrangement of popular houseplants, landscape gardening, and commercial plantations makes certain botanical species as desirable “plants” and others as unwanted “weeds”. A tidy and manicured garden often requires “weeding” as a recurrent practice where certain plants become the ideal non-human “citizens” while others might go through the violence of uprooting. The clearing out of a considerable portion of jungles, the collection of many indigenous plants, and the plantation of non-native plants can trigger the displacement of many endemic plant species and promote the growth of invasive species. This paper aims to develop gardening citizenship as a theoretical paradigm through photographic practices, critiquing the scope and politics of arrangement and displacement to depict how these acts trigger different possible co-emergences of plant-human-animal citizenship in the garden. In gardening aesthetics, as new plants often emerge into existence from gene modification, hybridisation, or cloning driven by human desire, they often take up agentic roles to mould humans in trans-corporeal engagements. Furthermore, this paper seeks to understand, question, and elaborate on gardening practices within diverse relations, such as possession, commercialisation, parenting, as well as contesting spaces for plantation—uprooting, domesticating—synanthropic desires, and other ethical grounds. Through posthuman and post-dual approaches, this paper will travel through various photographs in which wilderness transforms into gardens and vice versa, analysing “natural-cultural convergence, comprehending the resonances, impacts, affects and effects of our being-in-the-world” (Ferrando 20). (read full paper)
Speaker: Aditi Roy
Title: "(Presentation) THE VEGETAL REBIRTH: Bodily Autonomy and Posthuman Interconnectedness in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’"
Abstract: "A woman chooses to stop eating meat and that singular decision unravels her entire life. By the time the story ends, we see the protagonist has abandoned all her human identity in favour of being a plant. Her sister too, feels a deep connection and a symbolic appeal in nature that resonates with her own suffering and desire to escape her circumstances. That is the foreground of this novel from South Korea.
This paper examines how this interconnectedness reflects posthumanist ethics: dissolving species boundaries, challenging human exceptionalism, and advocating for ethical relations between humans, non-humans, and the environment. The Vegetarian thus functions as a work of posthuman renaissance literature, staging processes of rebirth and transformation that resist Eurocentric, anthropocentric, and patriarchal legacies of fixed identity. Its fragmented, multi perspective structure mirrors the porous and multiple subjectivities central to posthuman identity, contesting monolithic notions of selfhood.
Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of posthuman becoming as a non-unitary, embodied process that disrupts human exceptionalism, and Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, the paper argues that the novel destabilizes binaries such as human/animal, culture/nature, and male/female. In doing so, it advances a feminist posthuman politics of refusal and alternative forms of agency.
Ultimately, this paper positions The Vegetarian as a posthumanist text that foregrounds transition and the breaking away from normative identity narratives through a dialogue with key feminist theorists. (read full paper)
Keywords: Agency, Feminism, Posthumanism, Interconnectivity
Speaker: Mousumi Paul
Title: Entangled Identities: A Posthumanist Reading of How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy
Abstract: "With the emergence of posthumanist culture, there is a sharp need for a paradigm change that could substitute a non-anthropocentric set of ideologies for the humanist way of thinking. It is evidently incorrect to promote Man as the single unitary autonomous model of human identification. Human exceptionalism begins to erode with posthumanism, which also promotes a more dispassionate evaluation of the relational, discursive, and performative aspects of power. Wider perspectives on the cosmos are made possible by challenging anthropocentric orthodoxies. As a new field in the twenty-first century, posthumanism offers a critical analysis of the traditional interpretations of humanist principles.
Sumana Roy's How I Became a Tree (2017) is an elegant posthumanist exploration of human-nonhuman-environmental interconnectivity. Defying anthropocentrist conceptions of identity, productivity, and worth, the text dissolves hard partitions between human and nature and presents in their stead a fluid relational ontology. Through descriptive narration and reflective commentary, Roy underscores trees' consciousness, nonhuman life's agency, and each other's vulnerabilities amongst all living beings. This paper looks at How I Became a Tree through a posthumanist lens to show how the novel criticizes exploitative forms of industrial modernity and patriarchal forms of self-constitution. Presenting the self as co-constituted with trees, earth, and other nonhumans, Roy's writing highlights ecological interdependence and challenges human exceptionalism. The paper presents how the author refigures identity as an intra-actional network (Barad, 2007) and presents a radical vision of ethics toward sustainable coexistence. Lastly, How I Became a Tree is a literary site where posthumanist thought and environmental ethics converge and impinge our thinking toward reconfiguring our relationship to the living world in the midst of ecological crises." (read full paper)
DAY 1 — 14 JANUARY 12:30 – 1:30 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 1: Nature as Subject
Speaker: Saikat Chakraborty
Title: Natural Sublimity as Crisis: Interrogating Human Supremacy in Ranen Ghosh
Abstract: Since the advent of Enlightenment and its subsequent modernity, nature has been imagined as detached from the human beings. The advent of natural sciences also allowed the humans to interpret nature- thereby positing nature as the object and humans as the subject. Thus, nature became an object to satisfy and gratify human needs. It is in this juncture, the following work attempts to look at nature not as an object but a site of sublimity that arises awe and dread in human perception. For that, the work tries to read Ranen Ghosh’s short story Amanushik Sagar-Manush (Inhuman Sea-Human) where the standardization of the ‘human’ as an aspirational category is interrogated by the natural sublimity. The interrogation occurs through the liminal space between the ‘manush’/human and ‘amanush’/a-human, that brings a sense of crisis to human perceptions. Here the work attempts to explore this crisis as the anxiety of entanglement between the human, nature and the a-human and show how nature is not a mere object at the disposal of humans but is an organism that can interrogate human supremacy over other species. Apart from that, the work also interrogates how the a-human or the amanush creates a sense of existential angst within humanity through the Freudian analytic of the ‘uncanny’.
Speaker: Debosmita Routh
Title: Under His Eye, Beyond His Reach: Posthuman Resistance in Atwood's Gilead
Abstract: "The Republic of Gilead as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels ""The Handmaid’s Tale"" (1985) and ""The Testaments"" (2019) may be seen as a posthuman laboratory – a space for complex and nuanced dialogues on individual bodily agency, reproductive sovereignty, and human subjectivity in totalitarian regimes. Traditional humanist notions of subjectivity and autonomy are dismantled by the theocratic government that reduces women to their reproductive functions, and creates a society with hierarchical divisions based on twisted notions of class, purity, and reproductive capability. Drawing from Braidotti’s ‘posthuman feminism’ and Ferrando’s ‘existential posthuman,’ the paper attempts to position Gilead as a speculative site where dichotomies of human-posthuman and subject-object become critically configured through biopolitical control, especially reproductive surveillance systems that operate on the female body.
The medicalization of fertility, the mechanization of reproductive function, and the panoptic gaze embodied by the motto of the Republic of Gilead – “Under His Eyes” – make the female body a posthuman biopolitical warzone. This paper aims to show how radical dehumanization reducing women to “two-legged wombs” paradoxically creates conditions that ignite posthuman resistance. Characters like Offred, Agnes, and Aunt Lydia navigate their posthuman condition by using “situated knowledges” and operating through vulnerable interdependence to contribute to the larger resistance. Each of them functions as “mini brains” to contribute to the larger embodied posthuman strategy of survival, adaptation, and networked subversion instrumental in the dismantling of Gilead’s totalitarian regime." (read full paper)
*************** Hariom Singh *********************
Speaker: Soumya Sur
Title: Toward an Inclusive Discourse of War Suffering: Expanding the Affective and Ethical Boundaries of Conflict
Abstract: "This paper explores how war narratives can move beyond anthropocentric frames to include the often-ignored suffering of the non-human world. Conventional representations of war, whether in literature, cinema, or historical testimony, have largely privileged human trauma while relegating environmental and animal suffering to the margins. This exclusion, I argue, perpetuates a narrow understanding of conflict and recovery that fails to recognise the ecological continuities of violence.
Through a posthuman and ecocritical lens (anti-anthropocentrism), my presentation interrogates how landscapes, flora, and fauna bear the residual imprints of warfare, chemical contamination, habitat loss, radiation, and species extinction, yet remain voiceless within dominant cultural memory. The paper as a whole will engage with the idea of an inclusive discourse of suffering, where human and non-human grief coexist within a shared ethical horizon.
This will question how the act of witnessing and representing can extend empathy beyond species boundaries. By reframing war through an ecological imagination, this paper invites a rethinking of violence and vulnerability, urging a shift from human-centred heroism to planetary ethics and posthuman compassion. It, thus, initiates a conversation on what an “inclusive humanism” might mean in the posthuman age, where the ethical, ecological, and existential aftermaths of war demand to be felt, narrated, and collectively remembered."
DAY 1 — 14 JANUARY 2:30 – 3:30 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 2: The Anthropocene, Question of Agency, and Geopolitical Precarity
Speaker: Dr. Koyel Basu
Title: Posthumanism In The Anthropocene Era: Challenges To International Relations
Abstract: "We exist in a singular social nature (Mitchell, Levine, Dalby, Burke, 2015). Post-humanism is a social construct, an acknowledgment of a perspective that human supremacy which is so universalized cannot negate the urge to understand the diversity of species and non-human beings as a vast repertoire of international relations. Precisely, the tangle between the human and non-human life caused the Anthropocene to disturb the traditional political categories. An illustration is the Covid-19 pandemic.
The main point of this research paper is that International Relations (IR) needs to rethink its human-centric view and consider non-human elements like technologies and ecologies. I use Latour’s paradoxical validation of the “we have never been modern” as a way to expose the humans/non-humans divide as a political construct that has become unsustainable in the position of the Anthropocene. The grand theories of international relations portray that the world is an object to be appropriated, circumnavigated, instrumentalized and englobed (Sloterdijk, 2014). I intend to expand Sloterdijk’s critique of ‘englobement’ to explain why focusing on states and borders, as traditional IR does, is inadequate to understand state politics. Besides, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari view politics beyond fixed entities to provide sufficiently critical insights on human centrism, power and social justice. I use their Assemblage theory to illustrate the idea that non-human elements undermine Westphalian sovereignty.
Challenges to International Relations can be combatted by comprehending different kinds of agency. This paper explores how the critical International Relations scholarship dismantles the species hierarchy where humans get an exalted position. I refer to the works of Weber, Hobden and Mbembe to show how my perspective departs from other critiques of Anthropocentrism. (read full paper)
Speaker: Apurba Mandal
Title: Existential Posthumanism and the Rohingya Community: A Reading of Roshidullah Kyaw Naing’s Poetry Collection, The Painful Life of Rohingya: The Voices of Rohingya Genocide Survivor to the World (2022)
Abstract: The displaced identity of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and various host nations is one of the most thought-provoking humanitarian and existential conflicts that reveals the profound vulnerability of human beings in the 21st century. Several legal and military campaigns, along with constitutional reforms (including the 1982 Citizenship Law), have stripped Rohingyas of their fundamental citizenship rights in Myanmar, rendering them stateless. This paper seeks to explore how the poetry collection, The Painful Life of Rohingya: The Voices of Rohingya Genocide Survivor to the World (2022) by Rohingya poet Roshidullah Kyaw Naing serves as a site for questioning the Rohingya identity, the meaning of their lives, and their existence as displaced persons in Myanmar and Bangladeshi refugee camps. Within the framework of existential posthumanism, the paper aims to analyze the Rohingya crisis and how ethnic discrimination, displacement, and statelessness create a sense of meaninglessness and precarious existence for the Rohingyas. Drawing on the theoretical ideas of posthuman thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Giorgio Agamben, and Francesca Ferrando, this study portrays the Rohingyas as geopolitical victims and a vulnerable community. Through recurring motifs such as longing for Arakan (the birthplace), affection for parents, confinement in refugee camps, depression, fear, and fragile hope for education, justice, and peace, the poems articulate a profoundly decentralized identity of the Rohingya community. Therefore, as a poet, Roshidullah Kyaw Naing embodies a ‘posthuman subjectivity’ that calls for a broadened ethics of coexistence beyond national, political, and legal boundaries. (read full paper)
Speaker: Sainaz Farzana Kazi
Title: Contagious Becoming: Nonhuman Agency and the Deconstruction of Victorian Dualism in Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire
Abstract: "[for Presentation/Panel Session]
Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire (1897), if read from a 21st-century posthuman lens, reveals a crack in the Victorian Humanism that was an offspring of the Renaissance. My presentation takes back the Vampire metaphor in the novel to its core: the bat. The bat's genes, which had infected the protagonist's grandmother, become a defining, destructive life force not just for Harriet, but for her ""near"" ones, both figuratively and literally.
I shall explain how this flow of nonhuman life force breaks the carefully curated binaries between the animal and the human, the “savage” and the “civil”, and the self and the Other. My focus will be on the otherizing of Harriet Brandt for her racial identity as well as her genetic connection to an actual nonhuman animal that has, in a way, been co-existing with her for three generations, and which now threatens and contaminates the racially superior clan too.
Moreover, drawing on New Materialism, I'll be demonstrating how the agency of the Other-human makes not just a contact but also a contract with the nonhuman in their shared alienation from the “civilized” English society. This material entanglement ultimately puts a challenge to the Victorians’ carefully curated sense of performative existence. This analysis of literary non-dualism shows why a true Posthuman Renaissance, or a radical re-nasci, must begin by acknowledging the transformative, vibrant matter of the Other, instead of trying to exclude it." (read full paper)
Speaker: Agni Guha Khasnobis
Title: Posthuman Intimacies and the Crisis of Connection: Jeanette Winterson’s 'Frankissstein' in the Age of the Anthropocene
Abstract: Jeanette Winterson’s 'Frankissstein: A Love Story' (2019) presents a compelling literary exploration of posthuman futures and fractured intimacies in the wake of the Anthropocene. As a speculative reimagining of Mary Shelley’s 'Frankenstein', Winterson’s novel blends past and future, body and machine, love and code, to interrogate the disintegration of human connection in a chronically online, hyper-technologized world. This paper examines 'Frankissstein' through the lens of existential posthumanism, engaging the novel’s depiction of AI, sexbots, and disembodied consciousness as both symptomatic of and response to a deepening alienation exacerbated by climate collapse, digital saturation, and the commodification of intimacy. It will interrogate how the novel resists techno-utopianism and critiques the techno-capitalist promise of artificial intimacy and immortal life as extensions of humanist fantasies of control, mastery, and disconnection from ecological and relational realities. The paper will attempt to situate ‘Frankissstein’ within the framework of Posthuman Renaissance and argue that Winterson reclaims the narrative of rebirth as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring the embedded, embodied, and ecological dimensions of being. The novel foregrounds the necessity of rethinking existence beyond anthropocentric, dualistic, and disembodied paradigms. Drawing on posthumanist theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Katherine Hayles, the paper considers how 'Frankissstein' stages a literary and philosophical intervention into contemporary crises of meaning, connection, and planetary care. (read full paper)
DAY 1 — 14 JANUARY 2:30 – 3:30 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 2: Monster Hybridities
Speaker: Reeswav Chatterjee & Shalini Chakraborty
Title: "Hastar Aa Jayega”: Anatomy of Humanism’s horror in the locus of Posthuman Bodies"
Abstract: "The epistemological construction of ‘horror’ inside the humanist rubric often acknowledges, albeit unconsciously and unwillingly, the persistent and subversive threat of non-normative Posthuman bodies. Rahi Anil Barve’s 2018 film Tumbbad constructs the ‘grotesque’ through the distortion of the aesthetic, normative body images of humanism; as the unruly, distorted human and nonhuman bodies escape the humanist episteme to become the chief source of discomfort, anxiety and horror for the audience. The mythical, nonhuman entity called Hastar is imagined and stylized as an anatomical hybrid between human and animal, but both in a distorted form. This non-normative body— a result of anatomic distortion of animalness and humanness— fractures the humanist, aesthetic corporeal familiarity in the viewer. Victims of Hastar don’t die, technically they don’t even get wounded. Instead, their human bodies receive severe anatomical disfiguration and they physiologically transform into an excruciatingly painful, immortal hybrid body. This metamorphosed body of the victim tears apart the anatomical symmetry of the familiar, Vitruvian human body image; but along with that inexplicability of such a body threatens the limitations of Humanist episteme. These two effects, created by the metamorphosed body, complimentarily create the anxiety and constructs Humanism’s horror.
Construction of Humanism’s horror relies upon the very process of posthuman transformation, too. The agonizing punishment for avarice, the legendary curse upon the village— all of these are made possible by a process of physical posthumanization. When the protagonist returns to Tumbbad after decades, he finds that his grandmother’s body— one of the victims of Hastar— has transformed into a hybrid of a human and a tree. Even if we keep aside the disfigured body image, this physical posthumanization itself posits a threat to humanism. In all the victims, the autonomy and imperviousness of the normative humanist body is compromised.
The posthumanization of the victims has happened only in the corporeal realm and not at all in terms of their cognizance or psychological reality. This dualist presence of physical hybridity and cognitive humanness in them is precisely the locus of the horror. The hybrid corporeal experience is being received and interpreted by signifiers of humanness. Interestingly, Hastar’s action is interpreted by human cognizance in terms violence and revenge but there is no definitive evidence to claim the same for Hastar. Therefore this paper would aim to understand the non-human body as an object of human enquiry and as an object of horror, as it lacks the privilege of being a subject itself. Hastar’s attempt of posthumanising the normative human body might be seen as an act of resistance of the non-human other. Moreover, the fact that Hastar’s actions deprives the human of its privileged position in the anthropocene and force it to become an ‘other’, demands further investigation. This paper would particularly engage with these concerns.
Keywords :- Posthuman Transformation, Hybridity, Distortions, Cognizance, Non-epistemic."
Speaker: Rifat Ara Khatun
Title: Breaking Free from Humanism and Branching Towards Posthumanism: Tracing Posthuman Reflections in Gieve Patel’s Art
Abstract: "This study explores the human and the more-than-human entanglement in Gieve Patel’s artistic oeuvre through the theoretical framework of critical posthumanism. Patel’s artistic endeavour presents the unabashed “grief, violence, and affliction” (Haskote 2024) of urban surrealism and the agency of nature. Intrinsic details in his art, when studied from close quarters, reflect overlapping zones of posthuman thought and expression. Patel’s canvases depict the human body as a site of violence — a heterogeneous assemblage of the human and the non-human, organic and inorganic that shows how the human body is no longer a pristine, autonomous entity but is porous and affected by its environment. A deep sense of trans-species solidarity and human-nature entanglement also finds expression through Patel’s art. The Looking into a Well series, particularly, captures the “invisible traces that we leave on our environment as we make our passage through place and period” (Haskote 2024). Patel rejects the notion of the human body as separate from the environment. He presents it as an assemblage of both biological and non-biological elements, deeply embedded in a decaying landscape; this perspective aligns well with Rosi Braidotti’s concept of the post-dualist body. Through a close analysis of select paintings and sculptures of Patel, this study proposes how they embody entangled materiality, critique anthropocentrism, and investigate an intermediary space that contests dichotomies such as human/nonhuman or life/death — thereby adhering to the principles of critical posthumanism.
Keywords: Gieve Patel, art, critical posthumanism, Human body, nature, anthropocentrism "
Speaker: Ajith Cherian
Title: "Feral Images & Howling Words: Stasis & Anastasis in László Krasznahorkai & Max Neumann’s Graphic Novella Animalinside"
Abstract: "The dog is more than a recurring motif in László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann’s collaborative work Animalinside, it is the structuring figure that connects both text and image. In Neumann’s stark silhouettes the faceless, muscular mastiff, without forelimbs, is trapped and tethered to an enclosed, restrictive and maybe a metaphysical space; and in Krasznahorkai’s dense, unyielding prose, the dog emerges as a force of menace, accusation, and annihilation. Though the dog is an unmistakable apocalyptic presence, it is not reducible to evil, death, or revolution, and resists allegorical containment.
My paper offers an analysis of the dog as figure in Animalinside. I argue that the dog functions at five interconnected levels: as apocalyptic presence, as projection of anthropogenic fears, as embodiment of the “animal inside,” as allegory of political and historical violence, and as linguistic force. I hope to demonstrate how the dog resists domestication into meaning and instead confronts readers with the irreducible violence both within and outside the human. The dog is ontogenetic in nature and simultaneously points to a cynical and derisive stasis, as well as a courageous hopelessness that may lead to anastasis — both remorse and rebirth."
Speaker: Safia Yasmin
Title: “The Stone-eater, Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, … All jumbled up together, to compose, A Parliament of Monsters”: A Study of Posthuman Body and Death in Nineteenth-century Britain
Abstract: "“The Stone-eater, Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, … All jumbled up together, to compose, A Parliament of Monsters”: A Study of Posthuman Body and Death in Nineteenth-century Britain
This paper examines the display of medical museums within the context of nineteenth-century display cultures by tracing the journey of deceased bodies through various settings. It focuses on the afterlife of diseased body parts in the medical marketplace, exploring how they were collected and what became of them in collections. Pathologists, as students of disease, dissected corpses and preserved their parts through injection or immersion in fluid, transforming them into objects of material culture. These body parts followed intricate routes—sourced from hospital wards, donated to esteemed institutions, or further divided at auctions. As they were traded, human remains took on new significance, with the identities of anatomists and collectors overshadowing those of the original patients. Within museums, diseased specimens dominated medical collections, reassembled to create tangible representations of illness. Curators arranged these organic specimens alongside paintings, photographs, models, and detailed catalogues, using paper, wax, and text to create interconnected systems centred around the pathological body. The purpose of medical museums was to standardise education, but visitors resisted control, reacting with awe or revulsion.
It suggests that death, often considered a human-centred existential limit, should be understood as part of a broader, more-than-human materiality and processual existence that transcends traditional tragedy. This shifts the focus from human loss to a more interconnected, ecological understanding of life and death that includes nonhuman agencies." (read full paper)
DAY 1 — 14 JANUARY 3:30 – 4:30 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 3: Spiritual Posthumanism
Speaker: Kaushiki Chowdhury
Title: You Are a Cosmic Dream: Reimagining Theory through Interactive Fiction
Abstract: Posthumanism has consistently called for inclusion and expansion—of subjectivity, materiality, relations, and affect, among others—yet, it has largely circulated in spaces inaccessible to the unprivileged. As a challenge to this exclusivity economy, this project is developed as an interactive fiction in Twine. The game that will result, You Are a Cosmic Dream, will use posthuman elements, including embodied figures, spaces beyond the ordinary, and existential challenges. The gameplay itself will focus on one of three distinct characters—Laika, Ayrshire [two-headed calf], and Angler [deep sea fish that surfaced this year]—travelling through one of the three distinct and corresponding worlds—Outer Space, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and Atlantis. The ultimate goal will be to find the elusive figure called the ‘posthuman,’ which itself has three different versions—‘(self),’ ‘other(),’ ‘future(__.’ Like in any game, You Are a Cosmic Dream will have challenges [or ‘Encounter’], and character quirks [or ‘Essence’] that make those challenges either easier or more difficult. Each character’s storyline will follow a similar structural rhythm—through Embodiment, Encounter, and Existence. However, capitalising on Twine’s conditional logic, player decisions will subtly influence variables tied to each character’s core tension—connection vs. isolation (Laika), duality vs. unity (Ayrshire), and visibility vs. obscurity (Angler). With minimalist design, as in Space Frog by npckc, and with themes of mourning, as in Goodbye by barrels, You Are a Cosmic Dream will have a meditative tone that will ideally translate dense theoretical concepts into interactive narrative forms. You Are a Cosmic Dream argues that digital play can act as an epistemological experiment: an act of making theory felt. The presentation will explain the prototype framework, conceptual structure, and early design. (read full paper)
Speaker: Sruti Bhaumik
Title: Panel Presentation: “Of Rituals, Rivers, and Rebirth : Towards an ethics of Posthuman Coexistence”
Abstract: "“Of Rituals, Rivers, and Rebirth : Towards an ethics of Posthuman Coexistence”
What does it mean to undergo rebirth in a posthuman world where the line between protector and destroyer, human and nonhuman, persistently shifts? This paper examines that question through the lens of Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative posthumanism, which understands all life as an ever-evolving process of ethical “becoming.” Using an interpretive conceptual philosophical method grounded in cultural depiction, it investigates how modern humanity misconstrues renewal for novelty.
Every year, we celebrate festivals such as Durga Puja or Chhath with unaltered rituals and unwavering delight, yet in human life we tire of continuity, replacing people and values as if novelty were virtue. This paradox raises the question of whether our idea of “rebirth” itself demands reconceptualization: is it an ethical renewal or selective repetition? A Bengali proverb says that if rituals did not exist, a daughter would have been a lifelong support; evoking the truth that, unlike other species, humans often let custom override instinctive care, making intelligence both a boon and a burden. Rebirth does not reject intellect; it realigns it with instinct so that thinking and feeling coexist rather than compete. Likewise, in Tagore’s Noukadubi, a river’s wreck rewrites human lives, portraying nature as the agent of moral renewal.
Through these contemplations the paper argues that the posthuman renaissance is not the formation of new selves but the retrieval of moral coexistence within an interlinked world. An ethical endurance of becoming that binds self and planet in one metamorphosing rhythm." (read full paper)
Speaker: Aiswarya M G
Title: The Divine Self and Posthuman Becoming: Insights from Swami Vivekananda
Abstract: "Swami Vivekananda’s interpretation of Advaita Vedanta represents a move from metaphysical abstraction toward existential realization. Existential posthumanism and Vivekananda’s Vedanta philosophy intersect around the themes of freedom, consciousness, and the transcendence of the limited human self. Vivekananda’s Vedantic humanism places divinity within the human rather than outside it. While Existential Posthumanism situates being embodied and relational process, Vivekananda’s Advaita Vedanta envisions the same through the realization of unity. The self (Atman) is identical with Brahman, and the realization of this unity dissolves boundaries between human, divine, and cosmic identities. This challenges the dualisms of human/nonhuman and subject/object, which converge with existential posthumanism, emphasizing the significance of relational being and decentered subjectivity. The research paper aims to intersect distinct intellectual genealogies, such as modern and secular thoughts converging with the ancient and spiritual notions, challenging anthropocentrism and reimagining the meaning of human existence. By situating Vivekananda’s thought in dialogue with the existential posthumanist notion of relational being, this research paper argues that Vedanta anticipates a posthuman ethics rooted in compassion, inter-being, and embodied identity. Reading Vivekananda through a posthuman lens foregrounds its relevance as a precursor to contemporary debates on consciousness, ecology, and the ethics of interconnection. Vivekananda’s Vedantic philosophy, when read through the lens of existential posthumanism, reveals a profound resonance with contemporary efforts to move beyond anthropocentrism and dualistic ontologies. Both Spiritual humanism and Existential posthumanism affirm that being is relational, embodied, and immanent, rejecting the separation of mind from matter, human from nature, and self from the world. The posthuman and the Vedantic self are ultimately two expressions of the same truth, which is to be connected to the divine consciousness, transcending the limitations of the human condition while remaining deeply grounded in embodied existence. (read full paper)
Keywords: Embodied Identity; Existential Posthumanism; Spiritual humanism; Vedantic Self"
Speaker: Dr. Emelia Noronha
Title: The Multiverse of Folklore: An Insight into Spiritual Posthumanism
Abstract: This paper works on the foundation provided by Francesca Ferrando and Debashish Banerji’s posthuman spirituality. Fernando’s spiritual and material continuity between humans, nonhumans, and the environment; and Banerji’s interpretation of “Indic posthumanism” is crucial to this study. This study is an exploration of the various traditions imbued in Indian folklore that contain the “Proto-posthumanist” ideas which are today being evoked by Indian cinema. The unexpected box-office success of Kantara, Bhediya, Dashavatara, Lokah is a wake-up call for the “slow renaissance” taking shape in the Indian cinema with regards to a reverence towards deeply rooted indigenous narratives thereby prioritizing cultural authenticity over universal commercial appeal. These narratives, animistic and indigenous worldviews, critique the western anthropocentric worldview that commodifies land, centralises the male perspective and dismisses indigenous ecological knowledge as “primitive superstition”. This paper analyses how rituals and traditions, particularly that of divine possession, are an integral part of spiritual posthumanism which is a possible path of realization in intra-related systems of individual, cosmic and even transcendental agencies. The Rakhandar of Konkan and the Bhoota Kola of coastal regions of Karnataka and northern Kerala challenge anthropocentric hierarchies. The hybridity and fluidity of the spirit, particularly nonhuman forms, that use the body as a site of potentiality – of power and agency and subjectivity, is worked out in this paper. Donna Haraway’s “sympoiesis” and Jane Bennett’s idea of “vibrant matter” helps to illuminate the animistic and ecological dimensions of folklore narratives, wherein nature, divinity, and humanity exist in an unbroken continuum. (read full paper)
DAY 1 — 14 JANUARY 3:30 – 4:30 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 3: Performance & Workshop
Speaker: Katarzyna Ferworn-Horawa
Title: ALLOW! Sensitivity, creativity, and agentiality in nonanthropocentric perspective (performance).
Abstract: "I ask myself – as philosopher, artist, woman, human, non-human and non/human in many embodied, embedded, and relational ways – HOW would my ancestors advise me TO ENGAGE in the social and planetary challenges of my times, so that my children and their children have a planet to co-exist in peace and health of all beings. I feel a call to CHALLENGE in their core the anthropocentric assumptions of the possibility to CONTROL. My artistic experience led me from representational practices of painting what I see (this entails control), to performative painting with my own body where I cannot control, even on the material level, the resulting artwork. From-to is a poietic process of REVELATION IN THE MAKING. The performative process, let’s say the technology of performative body, reveals the sensitivity, creativity, and agentiality of existence. My art depends on MY ALLOWING for the sensitivity, creativity, and agentiality of being a body to perform, in other words allowing for the non-human to speak to my human self in the making: Making Self, Making World.
In form of 4. PERFORMANCE (30 min/empty room/computer/sound equipment) and/or exhibition of one or two paintings, I invite others to experience non-human sensitivity, creativity, and agentiality of our bodies in movement (10 min). We will move freely to three songs, dedicated to sensitivity, creativity, and agentiality (10 min). Each of us individually will form INTENTION connected to the question of Making Self, Making World, and ALLOW sensitive, creative and agential solutions to emerge. Time to reflect (10 min)."
Speaker: Dr. Gitanjaly Chhabra
Title: "Erasure and Emergence, Immersion in Infinity: Posthuman Conceptualization of Consciousness"
Abstract: "The phenomenological immersion in infinite unity means exploring the boundaries of self and beyond. This exemplifies that consciousness is the fundamental essence of existence, beyond the limitations of subject-object duality, suggesting a non-dualistic view of reality – posthuman consciousness. This project explores posthuman consciousness through erasure poetry. Drawing from two selected science fiction novels – texts rich with speculative visions of more-than-human worlds – participants engage in the transformative act of erasure, uncovering latent voices, hybrid identities, and emergent meanings hidden within the original narratives. Through a posthuman lens, erasure poetry can embody a non-dualistic perspective on consciousness, where awareness is not confined to a human subject but is understood as an emergent quality of entangled relations. The act of erasing is not simply subtraction but an attunement to what remains. It is an openness to the interplay of absence and presence, silence and language. In this way, the page, the ink, the sharpie, the technology, and the spaces between words participate in meaning-making, blurring the boundaries between the creator, the creation and the non-human agencies. This practice mirrors non-anthropocentric consciousness, where nonhuman agencies co-arise, co-constitute, and continually transform one another. Drawing on Pepperell’s insights on posthuman conceptualization of consciousness (embodied, embedded, distributed, emergent), ultimately, this project positions erasure poetry not only as an aesthetic practice but as a techno-spiritual tool for reimagining consciousness which is decentered, intertextual, and co-constructed with the very systems and symbols it seeks to transcend.
Keywords: erasure poetry, emergence, consciousness, posthuman, distributed agency"
DAY 2 — 15 JANUARY 12:00 – 1:00 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 1: Multispecies Identities
Speaker: Suryakanth K.B
Title: "From Homo Faber to Homo Entangled: A Posthuman Renaissance of Co-existence"
Abstract: "This paper addresses the core Existential Posthumanist questions—How should we live? How do we co-exist? How can we bring these insights into practice?—by challenging the myth of the autonomous, unassisted human. Tracing from the big history this paper argues that humans are natural born cyborgs since from the stone age and beyond which is defined by entanglement with technology. This historical perspective refutes the fundamental dualism separating the ‘natural’ self from ‘technological’ tools, framing technology (from axes to algorithms) as an inseparable part of our evolutionary and ontological becoming (re-nasci).
Then this paper also examines how contemporary technologies is utilised in projects like Earth Species Project to eliminate the communication barriers with non humans and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) which provides practical means for closer co-existence by bridging human and computers, which enables the technological rebirth to entangle with non humans and to learn how to live not just with technology, but through it, as a relational node in the planetary web.
To bring the complex insight into practice this paper argues novelty role of speculative fiction to bring the insights into collective practice. Following the model of oral literatures teaching cultural values and modes of existence (e.g., respect for a river god, fear of a forest spirit). The Speculative fiction has now taken this role to teach people posthuman values, with films like Mickey 17 guides by enabling the imagination and ethical navigation required for a truly post-anthropocentric co-existence and global Posthuman Renaissance. (read full paper)
Keywords: Existential Posthumanism, Natural-Born Cyborg, Technological Entanglement, Speculative Fiction, Big History, Multispecies Co-existence"
Speaker: Tanvi Deepak Shah
Title: Utopian Spaces Beyond the Earth: A Posthuman Analysis of Becky Chambers’ The Long to a Small, Angry Planet Abstract: Over centuries, Western thought has dictated the manner in which humans perceive gender, sex, and sexual identity as confined to binary frameworks. However, the contemporary age marked by technological evolution challenges human centrality and the notion of identity as a fixed construct. In this light, speculative fiction in literature has become a transformative site for social imagination. This paper is an analysis of the novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014) by Becky Chambers. The paper is grounded in Posthuman theory to explore the demarcation of gender, sex, and sexual identity as exemplified by the entities in the novel. It adopts a close reading to examine Chambers’ universe, inhibited by humans, non-human species, and artificial intelligence as an inclusive society. The paper draws on the concept of philosophical posthumanism by Francesca Ferrando to critique anthropocentrism, the idea of a cyborg as a hybrid being and a feminist metaphor by Donna Haraway, and the concept of gender performativity by Judith Butler to problematise gender and heteronormativity. By adopting this framework, the paper attempts to analyse the posthuman renaissance as envisioned by Chambers, where identity is fluid, constructed, and self-chosen. While previous studies have explored representations of identities, they lack alignment with literary theories. The paper concludes that the selected novel by Becky Chambers is a hopeful counter-narration to the dystopian science fiction that dismantles the conventional notions of identity and redefines it as fluid, hybrid, and queer, paving the way for a utopian society. (read full paper)
Speaker: Soumyadeep Sarkar
Title: Decentering the Human: Posthuman Assemblages and Ethical Relationality in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival
Abstract: My paper examines Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival as a cinematic enactment of posthuman assemblage, arguing that the film destabilizes the centrality of human cognition by dispersing agency across human, alien, and technological networks. The film’s use of circular temporality, semagramic visuality, and non-linear montage does more than narrativize an alien encounter—it reconfigures spectatorship itself as a posthuman process. Meaning emerges not through human mastery of language but through entanglement with nonhuman forms of expression, including the heptapods’ semiotics and the film’s own audiovisual apparatus. In this framework, ethical agency is no longer grounded in individual human will but arises as an emergent property of multispecies and machinic relations.
Speaker: Rishila Mishra
Title: “In Body, and Become a Living Soul”: Wordsworth and the Vision of Existential Posthumanism
Abstract: "When the center breaks, all points converge. This paper examines the concept of existential posthumanism through the lens of William Wordsworth, one of the principal figures of the Romantic Movement. Existential posthumanism emphasizes the interconnectedness of all forms of life and challenges the anthropocentric worldview by decentering the human subject. In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth articulates a similar philosophical stance as he dissolves the boundaries of the self and merges with Nature, envisioning a spiritual unity that transcends human individuality. Within this framework, death is not viewed as an end but as a process of reintegration, an essential passage through which the self returns to the larger continuum of life, echoing the essence of his poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” The poem moves between nostalgia for lost innocence, acceptance of mortality, and the transcendence of the soul beyond human limits. Wordsworth’s meditation on mortality and the immortality of the soul reflects the existential posthumanist idea that being is processual- that life, death, and memory flow within an ever-evolving ecology of existence. This study further explores the intersections between pantheism, death, and existential posthumanism through his other works too, tracing how Wordsworth’s poetic imagination anticipates contemporary posthumanist thought and redefines the relationship between the self, mortality, and the natural world." (read full paper)
DAY 2 — 15 JANUARY 12:00 – 1:00 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 1: Birds, Beasts, and Bodies — Multispecies Engagement in the Anthropocene
Speaker: Hiya Chatterjee
Title: Birds, Beasts, and Bodies: A Multispecies Engagement in the Anthropocene
Abstract: "Panel Proposal –
This panel seeks to explore the posthumanist condition in the history, culture, literature and cinema of India and its diaspora through a decolonial intersectional approach. The objective of Sujay Thakur’s presentation is to reconfigure the notion of ‘human’ through a critique of savarna-centric discourses around food and its intrinsically violent nature that not only historically and culturally dehumanize Dalits, but also enforces the Brahmanical notions of purity and pollution on animals. To further expand on this, Hiya Chatterjee’s presentation challenges the Eco-orientalist perspective to critique certain assumptions made by early ecofeminist scholars and revisit questions of human and animal sexuality, fertility, motherhood, the mythopoeic feminization of nature and its ramifications on humans and non-humans in a rural setting. The panel also includes the urban posthuman subjectivity within its scope through Ved Prakash’s presentation which elaborates on the hierarchical notions of speciesism by examining relationships between humans and non-humans and the urban spaces they inhabit. Finally, in a spatio-temporal shift, Shayeari Dutta’s presentation foregrounds Indian indenture sea-crossings as a kind of multispecies framework— a Kala Pani ethnography always in motion and in need of demystification— emblematic of the several interconnected processes of “kin-making” that challenge a colonial logic of extraction. The panel intends to conduct a boundary crossing exercise towards interrogating the limits of humanness in its multiple contexts by simultaneously questioning the anthropocentric gaze around notions of the non-human." (read full paper)
***** Ved Prakash ****** (read full paper)
***** Sujay Thakur ****** (read full paper)
***** Shayeari Dutta ****** (read full paper)
DAY 2 — 15 JANUARY 2:00 – 3:00 Parallel Sessions: P C Mahalanobis 2: Ecological Precarity
Speaker: Dr. Surabhi Jha
Title: Paper Presentation-"Ecologies of Marginality: Nonhuman Forces in Dalit Women’s Autobiographical Writing"
Abstract: Recent critical discourses in posthumanism—articulated by scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, Ursula Heise, and Stacy Alaimo—have emphasized that environmental and posthuman concerns are deeply intertwined. The posthuman condition emerges not only from the technological transformation of the human but also from ecological crises that foreground the agency of nonhuman forces in shaping human life. This paper attempts to read Bengali Dalit women’s autobiographical writings through an ecoposthumanist lens, focusing particularly on Kalyani Thakur Charal’s “Why Do I Write Charal?” and Lily Halder’s “College Life.” These narratives foreground a porous interdependence between the human and the nonhuman, where vegetal, animal, and elemental presences become integral to the formation of Dalit female subjectivity. Through images such as the dead cow, the bel tree, jute fibres, and fishes in Charal’s text, and chicken pox, bakul trees, peacocks, and the Damodar river in Halder’s narrative, the autobiographies reveal how ecological and caste realities inteHaquersect in shaping lived experience. By locating Dalit women’s life-writing within the framework of ecoposthumanism, this paper argues that their texts articulate a mode of relational existence that challenges both anthropocentric and upper-caste humanist epistemologies. (read full paper)
Speaker: Soyel Haque
Title: "Posthuman Ecology and the Vulnerability of Life in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (Presentation)"
Abstract: "Posthuman Ecology and the Vulnerability of Life in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007) is recognized as one of the most influential works of environmental destruction and posthuman transformation in contemporary Indian literature. Set in the fictional city of Khaufpur—a clear reflection of the Bhopal gas disaster—the novel depicts the chronic toxicity of industrial modernity, where the boundaries between humans, animals, and technology blur. This article analyzes Animal's People from the theoretical perspective of posthuman ecology, which displaces human hegemony and brings to light the interdependent and sensitive state of all forms of life in the Anthropocene.The main character, “Animal,” whose body is disfigured by chemical pollution, is a powerful example of posthuman thought. He forges a new connection between biodiversity and toxicity, the human and the nonhuman. His voice becomes a document of environmental suffering, resilience, and resistance to the exploitation of global capitalism. In line with the theories of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Stacy Alaimo, Sinha shows how bodily suffering can be shaped into a critique of anthropocentrism. The polluted environment, hybrid bodies, and social insecurity depicted in the novel expand the moral boundaries of life and care beyond the human.
By situating Animal’s People in the light of a posthuman sensibility, this study argues that Sinha’s work points the way to a new ecological ethic—one that does not rely on governance or authority, but rather on interdependence, compassion, and planetary responsibility. Ultimately, Animal’s People emerges as a posthuman ecological text that challenges the reader to acknowledge the fragility of existence and to imagine the possibility of coexistence in a world irreversibly altered by human excess." (read full paper)
Speaker: Siddhesh S. Raut
Title: "Coconut, Sea, and Self: A Posthuman Reading of the Goan Everyday."
Abstract: "This paper looks at how everyday life in Goa through simple things like food, water, and dreams expresses a deep sense of connection between humans, nature, and existence.It explores how Goan culture often erases the boundary between human and nonhuman life, turning ordinary experiences into moments of reflection and meaning.
Goa’s traditional foods like fish curry rice, sorpotel, and patoleo carry memories of home and community while reflecting a close relationship with nature and the sea. Water, whether found in village wells, monsoon floods, or the ocean, appears both as a source of life and a reminder of nature’s power, symbolising both human vulnerability and ecological balance. Dreams, drawn from Goan folklore and storytelling, connect the living with ancestors and the natural world, expanding the idea of the self beyond the limits of the human body.
Through these everyday experiences, Goa itself becomes a symbol of coexistence and interdependence. This study argues that Goan life expresses an ecological way of thinking one that values connection over control. Food keeps memories alive, water represents renewal, and dreams dissolve the boundaries between worlds. Together, they form a quiet yet powerful vision of life where everything is linked in a shared cycle of being.
Keywords: Cultural consciousness, Ecology, Everyday life, Goa, Posthumanism."
Speaker: Vaishnavi Singh
Title: Terraforming the Self: Ecological Adaptation and Posthuman Identity in Meru
Abstract: "This paper analyzes S.B. Divya’s novel Meru is a significant work of speculative fiction that explores posthumanist and ecological themes. Recent research has placed the novel within the contexts of disability awareness and postcolonialism; this study links these frameworks to the novel’s central theme of planetary survival. It asserts that the protagonist Jayanthi’s ‘self-terraforming’ surpasses a mere technological enhancement, embodying a complex ethic of repair. This analysis examines the interconnection of biological adaptation, identity formation and ethical responsibility through a close reading of the novel in dialogue with prominent posthumanist theorists, including Francesca Ferrando, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. The research paper aims to show how Jayanthi’s ecological adaptation transforms posthuman identity into a liquid, hybrid and relational construct. Additionally, it demonstrates how the novel alters our perspective of disability, thereby turning it into an evolutionary benefit that depends on the environment rather than a deficiency. Jayanthi’s journey, which ends with a plan for generations and the planet to live together, is a good example of how to deal with the problems of the Anthropocene. It shows the ethics of repair that is based on caring for others and being willing, which is essential for a livable future.
Keywords: Posthuman Identity, Ecological Adaptation, Genetic Modification, Ethics of Repair, Speculative Fiction, Posthumanism, Meru." (read full paper)
DAY 2 — 15 JANUARY 2:00 – 3:00 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 2: Technological Incorporations
Speaker: Akriti Kujur
Title: Worlds in Superposition: Quantum Posthumanism in select Indian Speculative Fiction Abstract: "At the intersection of science, philosophy, and storytelling lies a growing body of fiction that reimagines reality through the strange logic of quantum thought. This paper examines how such a quantum posthumanist approach emerges in South Asian speculative writing through Jayant Narlikar’s cosmological fiction, Manjula Padmanabhan’s “Annexe” from The Stolen Hours, and “Mirror Rorrim” from The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Volume 1. Each of these works employs quantum concepts such as indeterminacy, entanglement, and superposition to question the coherence of human identity and the nature of perception itself. Narlikar’s narratives merge scientific precision with metaphysical curiosity, transforming astrophysical uncertainty into a meditation on humanity’s fragile place within an expanding cosmos. Padmanabhan’s “Annexe” explores technological isolation and corporeal instability, where the body becomes a porous boundary between organic life and artificial control. In “Mirror Rorrim,” the play of reflection and inversion evokes quantum simultaneity, fracturing consciousness into multiple, coexisting realities that unsettle the idea of authorship and linear temporality. Together, these texts reveal how South Asian writers engage with the posthuman condition not as a distant technological fantasy but as an ontological reality in which being is relational, unstable, and interdependent. By merging scientific imagination with philosophical pluralism, these stories redefine what it means to be human within a universe of shifting probabilities, suggesting that the posthuman self is not a successor to humanity but an entangled state of becoming within the quantum fabric of existence."
Speaker: Tajuddeen Nadaf
Title: Being in the Machine Age: Existential Posthumanism in Machinehood(2021)
Abstract: "Existential posthumanism is a recently developed posthumanist thought which emerged from contemporary conditions shaped by ecological precarity,technological acceleration and shifting human identities. This notion of how to exist within this changing ontology — emphasizing awareness, relationality, and the embodied enactment of interdependence among human, non-human, and technological beings, diverges from earlier theoretical posthumanism.Although existential posthumanism can be considered as a practical form of posthumanism (the practice of posthumanism), literary studies still remain relevant in contributing to this strand of entanglement. This paper applies the framework of existential posthumanism to S. B. Divya’s novel Machinehood (2021), which provides a fertile narrative site for exploring these concerns, dramatizing a near-future world where biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and the gig economy fuse to redefine what it means to be alive, sentient, and ethical.
This paper analyzes Machinehood (2021) as both a reflection and an experiment in posthuman living. Divya’s depiction of enhanced bodies, cognitive pills, artificial labor, and machine sentience stages questions regarding authenticity of human in a world where agency is shared with machines and also about the forms of dignity, responsibility, and freedom when biological limits are blurred by technology. From an existential posthumanist perspective, Machinehood(2021) yields several insights by demonstrating that relational being is inescapable; human identity is continuously co-constituted by its technological and ecological milieu. This paper also highlights the role of literature in cultivating existential awareness by guiding readers to envision and rehearse modes of posthuman existence before they become quotidian realities."
Speaker: Dr. Souvik Kar
Title: “The Girl Who was a Bomb”: Existential Posthumanism, Bioengineering Ethics, and Radioactive (Anti)Heroism in Senaa Ahmad’s “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls” (2021)
Abstract: This paper operationalizes existential posthumanist frameworks to investigate the ethical conundrums of bioengineering-based female superheroism in Senaa Ahmad’s story “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls”. I show that the story critiques the hypernationalist intermeshing of nuclear weapons in India with a militant femininity in service of the broadly patriarchal nation-state—exemplified in the naming of the Pokhran-II nuclear tests as “Operation Shakti” and the tested thermonuclear bombs themselves as Shakti (after the Hindu warrior goddess who protects the gods against their demonic enemies). This occurs through the story’s primary focus on a state-sponsored project to mutate female bodies into superheroic bodies through exposure to nuclear radiation, which turns them into human nuclear bombs capable of destroying cities while retaining their bodily integrity. Juxtaposing Margrit Shildrick’s idea of the posthumanist “monstrous body” and Gabrielle Hecht’s idea of “nuclearity” (the socio-politico-cultural factors which determines to what degree something is considered ‘nuclear’), I will critically examine how the story, through its strategic use of the second person, centers the reader as one of such “glow-in-the-dark girls” attempting to envision a posthumanist ethics to address a nuclear embodiment where characters have their relationship to the world forcibly reduced to one only of mass destruction. Such an ethics, I will thus show, radically reimagines postcolonial embodiment, questioning the rhetoric of empowerment at the heart of this hypernationalist meshing of nuclear weapons with militant divine femininity, revealing the unstable, precarious, mutating nature of the female body pressed into service of the nuclear state as a posthumanist superheroic subject. (read full paper)
Speaker: Granthana Ganguly
Title: Empathy, Recognition and Solidarity: Biovalue and Posthumanism in Chen Qiufan’s Translated Works of SF
Abstract: "Speculative fiction (SF) is replete with images of posthumans and postanimals that challenge the exceptionalism of humans and essentialism of humanism through futuristic and alien settings. The works of SF selected for this paper are dystopic in nature, such that, instead of challenging anthropocentrism, they are set in landscapes and economies of aggravated capitalism where matter, both organic and inorganic, serves simply as repositories of biovalue to be extracted for surplus profit, where the biosphere has been deteriorated beyond repair, and technology has replaced anthropocentrism with technocentrism. This paper will look into the popular SF works of Chen Qiufan, in translation — the novel, Waste Tide and the short stories, ‘The Fish of Lijiang’ and ‘The Year of the Rat’ through the lens of critical and existential posthumanism to probe into the definition of ‘human’ and investigate the underlying politics of biovalue that transform subjectivities in the face of technological, biopolitical and ecological evolution. To problematise the human/animal/machine/ecology divide, the author blurs existing boundaries through the portrayal of discriminatory commodification, surveillance, and experimentation on selected bodies to fulfil profit quotas and collect biodata. Finally, it will explore the acts of resistance, such as the exercise of empathy and a questioning of the dominant apparatuses of control, which ushers in the possibility of solidarity beyond species, classes and the human/non-human distinction, emblematic of affirmative posthumanities that culminate in renegotiations with identities and an anticipated dismantling of capitalistic and biovalue-centric systems of exploitation. (read full paper)
Keywords: Posthumanism, Animals, Biovalue, Affirmative Ethics, Capitalism, Speculative Fiction"
DAY 2 — 15 JANUARY 3:15 – 4:15 Parallel Sessions: P C Mahalanobis 3: Evolutionary Posthumanism /Feminist Interventions
Speaker: Aritra Basu
Title: Beyond Being Human: The Possible Spectrum of Evolutionary Posthumanism in Contemporary Literature
Abstract: "Posthumanism, as a critical theory, produces thought-provoking reflections on the evolutionary and existential aspects of the human species. It is informed by the predominance of global capitalism and the increasing development of technology, leading to AI on the one hand, and existential pressure from environmental degradation on the other. Existential Posthumanism raises serious questions about the enhancement paradigms of humankind. The course of human history seems to be directed towards scenarios with existential threats at every turn. The panel aims to discuss these existential and evolutionary aspects of the human species through the lens of ‘evolutionary posthumanism,’ which is almost coterminous with ‘existential posthumanism.’
The papers of the panel are what Ferrando calls “the possible developments of the human species”. The first paper, taking its cue from Charles Darwin’s theory of “the survival of the fittest,” argues (using Westworld) whether the emergence of anthropomorphic humanoid robots, which have been developed and evolved from humans themselves and are now outwitting their masters, can be treated as a kind of human evolution. The next paper, through a reading of Shoitaner Dinolipi, challenges the concept of monodirectional development, propounded by Renaissance humanism and subsequent Enlightenment, which encourages a theoretically endless journey towards progress, with the human consistently becoming better than its immediate predecessor. The third paper presents a radical reimagining of posthuman subjectivity that challenges both Western humanist frameworks and Eurocentric posthumanism itself, primarily in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. The final paper employs evolutionary posthumanist perspectives in Sobhyotar Abosesh to discuss the nature of the evolution of (post)humans in a post-natural planetary situation, where the distinctions between the natural and the artificial are blurred.
Keywords: Evolutionary Posthumanism, Existential Posthumanism, Survival of the fittest, Anthropocentrism, Human developments"
**** Swapnajeet Das ****
**** Dr Rumela Saha ****
Speaker: Eshani Bhattacharjee
Title: “when he wished me to live”: Radical reinscription of the Posthuman Feminine in narrativizations of the Galatea myth
Abstract: "The posthumanist turn of the era demands a reimagining of circumscribed modes of being set forth before such novel forms of life as this shift conceives. Existential posthumanism attempts to shoulder this task, foregrounding the here and the now across realms of existence– the personal, the social, the ontological, the planetary– positing existential dignity as their locus (Ferrando); it aims to mitigate the exclusionary tendencies which characterize Renaissance humanism.
The patriarchal, encroaching demarcation of the feminine in the era of the posthuman can hence be critically reimagined through this framework, which demonstrates the plastic borders of accepted modes of being. The myth of Galatea, poetically treated first in Metamorphoses (Ovid), is fecund interpretative ground to elucidate the above claim. Particularly, contemporary reimaginings of the mythic statue’s engagements in the human realm exhibit the posthumanist possibility of a feminine existence unencumbered by patriarchal restrictions. “Galatea” (Miller) toys with such a possibility, where the loving object of Pygmalion’s virile, violent love turns her all-embracing arms upon her creator. The horrors are probed further in “Miss Golden Dreams 1949” (Oates), with a cloned Marilyn Monroe doll breaking free of the suffocating implications of a human-in-the-loop circuitry. Both narratives carve out existences which cannot be contained within their distinctly humane narrative worlds; the possibilities lurk in their lack of narrative closure.
Through a panel session, the paper shall thus attempt an exploration of the Galatea myth in the contemporary imaginary, examining the possibilities such narratives afford in fashioning a feminine self which is distinctly posthumanist, in its deviations from the restrictive patriarchal existence delineated for it. The twin promises of inclusivity and dynamism for a posthuman womanhood, formerly inhibited by humanist frameworks laying their siege upon it, flow through these literary representations, anticipating Posthuman Renaissances. (read full paper)
Works Cited:
Ferrando, Francesca. “Existential Posthumanism: A Manifesto.” More Posthuman Glossary, edited by Emily Jones, Goda Klumbyte and Rosi Braidotti. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, pp. 47–49.
Miller, Madeline. Galatea. HarperCollins, 2013.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Miss Golden Dreams 1949.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 22 Apr. 2022, www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/read-exclusive-new-marilyn-monroe-short-story-joyce-carol-oates/ .
Ovid, and Stephanie McCarter. Metamorphoses. Penguin Books, 2022."
DAY 2 — 15 JANUARY 3:15 – 4:15 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 3: Philosophical Posthumanism
Speaker: Sreyasi Dey
Title: Looking at Yorick: The Posthuman Condition
Abstract: "Hamlet, skull in hand, has become a seminal moment in popular consciousness. In the play, the skull acts as a figure of existential rupture. The skull, a remnant of the late jester Yorick, violently confronts the humanist notion that the “piece of work”, “Man” is a fixed or rational being and affirms the self as an embodied network of energies and relations. The jester’s remains, reduced to non-human matter, enact the final collapse of the mind and body hierarchy. Through the examination of Yorick’s skull, the study showcases the unique spirit and jest of what Heidegger calls “being towards death”, is a plural notion, enacted through the body, the self, subject and subjectivity become entangled. Yorick’s remains become dynamic, matter ultimately participating in a vast, interconnected material network. It posits that the Prince of Denmark’s encounter with material reality forces the subject to acknowledge that all beings, kings to commoners return to the same base uses, thus negating the claim to ontological privilege. Rather, death becomes an ontological equalizer, forcing Hamlet and by proxy the audience to acknowledge the arbitrary nature of social and species hierarchies. Thus, it foregrounds the seat of the ‘self’ as the non-transcendent material and corporeal body. We ponder through the relationality of the skull, in its literal conversion to “humus” and the theatrical memento mori, as the symbol of continuous material transformation, compelling the posthuman praxis, rooted in acknowledging, radical relationality and an embedded finality."
Speaker: Rubaiya Nasrin
Title: "Rewriting the Human: Speciesism, Media Ecologies, and the Posthuman Renaissance"
Abstract: "This study argues that contemporary representation reverses speciesism into a structure of mental and affective warfare, where perception and empathy are weaponised through media to foster anthropocentric hegemony. By establishing a dialogue among film and media analyses, hermeneutics, and existential posthumanism, the study asserts that artistic portrayals today are conducted within the logics of Fifth-Generation Warfare (5GW)—a war of data, illustrations, and ideology—while simultaneously introducing visionary opposition through sympathy, maintenance, and interspecies principles. In this anxiety between manipulation and regeneration, the primary texts of this paper act in what may be classified as the Posthuman Renaissance: an ontological and moral rejuvenation grounded in coexistence and ecological consciousness.
Through comparative hermeneutic research of The History of Bees, Never Let Me Go, Okja, The Elephant Whisperers, Cowspiracy, and Dominion, and bringing them into conversation the paper explores how diverse media structures contour human–nonhuman perception. Novels such as The History of Bees and Never Let Me Go internalise speciesist doctrine through narrative intimacy, disclosing the psychological profundity of supervision and kindness. Films like Okja mobilise cinematic spectacle and affect theory (Marks, Sobchack, Plantinga) to reveal the emotional infrastructures of customer complicity. Documentaries like Cowspiracy, Dominion, and The Elephant Whisperers perform as counter-media, deploying pictorial deposition and witnessing to debase the exact informational instrument that 5GW exploits.
Using Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, the research investigates these texts as righteous laboratories, where meaning itself evolves as a spot of opposition to cognitive hegemony. Each work reconfigures spectatorship and narrative into deeds of ecological awakening, converting the spectator or reader from inactive consumer to moral participant.
Ultimately, the paper asserts that the battleground of the Anthropocene is perceptual: the conflict over what and whom we desire to notice, understand, and value. By interpreting the confluence of media, combat, and principles, the study employs storytelling as both weapon and remedy—a resourceful apparatus of the Posthuman Renaissance, where skill and empathy reprogram the human toward planetary coexistence.
Keywords: Speciesism, Posthumanism, Hermeneutics, Media Representation, psychological manipulation, Visual texts"
Speaker: Jayjit Sarkar
Title: From studia humantatis to humusities: Rethinking human and humanities through parasites
Abstract: To be human is to rise above the ground, to be different from other species. Parasitism espouses assymetrical relationship and radical dependency upon other species. Parasites help in the de-composition of the hubris of humanism into humus or the compost— that part of soil which is fertile and is composed of the bodies of the dead and the decomposed, humans and non-humans alike. It is a “situated” practice to be humble, to be grounded, to be close to the earth. Parasites as decomposers decay and decompose anything that is singular, sovereign and autonomous, here in case, the idea of human as shaped by the Enlightenment or the idea of studia humantatis as shaped by Renaissance. The words “human” and “humus” share common origins, but went on to different directions since then. Donna J. Haraway wants to completely do away with the word “human” or its corollaries, transhuman and posthuman, and suggests renaming of humanities, the study of humans, to humusities. “We are compost” she writes “not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist”. My paper will provide a detailed study of how becoming-parasite and becoming-humus can help us in rethinking categories like human or humanities in contemporary times.
Speaker: Subhagni Jana
Title: The who, the what, the why of Posthuman Retellings : How Human rhetoric, Human mythology meet the Posthuman Narrators
Abstract: "In the act of storytelling the narrator holds the reign as to how the story should be conveyed. This paper aims to discuss how the bridge between the self and the other can be connected halfway if a posthuman narrator decides to tell a human mythological tale. This paper is using Ralph Hardy’s Argos (a retelling of Odyssey from Odysseus’ dog Arogs’ point of view) and Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind (a retelling of the Medusa myth using various posthuman narrators) to elucidate the trajectory of anthropomorphising the other. The binary between the ‘human and the posthuman’, the ‘self – other’, the ‘who – what’, the ‘he/she/they – it’, exists prevalently even within the act of anthropomorphising the posthuman. Thus, this paper questions how the rhetoric here plays a substantial role in defining whether the action of closing the gap between the binary is truly successful within the act of storytelling. When the lived body of Argos takes up a very human voice, when the snakes on Medusa’s head start talking with very human concerns, it emphasizes the need to assign meaning to “something” or “someone” posthuman. Therefore it presents an existential question where the assigner and the assignee of the meaning and the one who is perceiving the meaning, meet halfway on a threshold of understanding “something” or “someone” that is beyond the human. Lastly, it concludes by asking the questions of whether such an act of retelling is successful to find a different meaning regarding whose story, who narrates, who reads. " (read full paper)
DAY 3 — 16 JANUARY 12:15 – 1:15 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 1: Existential Praxis I
Speaker: Kusumitha R
Title: Meditating the Molecule: Genetic Memory, Inner Silence, and the Becoming-Posthuman
Abstract: Within contemporary genetic narratives, the genome ceases to be a mere biological archive; it becomes a reflective site of consciousness, memory and ethical inquiry. The meditative act, traditionally inward and spiritual, is reconfigured in these narratives as a molecular practice of attunement to the living code that constitutes existence. Such reorientation dissolves the Cartesian divide between mind and matter, locating awareness not solely in cognition but within the distributed materiality of being. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notion of self-formation, Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative posthuman ethics, and Francesca Ferrando’s existential posthumanism, the paper reads genetic fiction as imaginative space where mediation becomes both a biological and philosophical event. The genetically modified subject, caught between scientific determinism and existential freedom, turns inward to negotiate selfhood within systems of control and manipulation. Through this inward silence, the posthuman subject enacts a counter-technology. By analysing selected genetic fiction texts, this study reveals how meditative stillness operates as a narrative and ethical device for reconfiguring identity beyond the humanist model. It proposes that genetic fiction functions as a contemplative laboratory where the molecule itself participates in self-reflection. Ultimately, the “meditating molecule” becomes an emblem of posthuman ethics, where awareness flows across biological, technological, and spiritual thresholds, and being is understood as an ever-evolving continuum of becoming.
Speaker: Dr Ramapriya Ramachandran
Title: Aerological Self And The Posthuman Condition: An Irigarian Reading Of Jenny Offill's Weather
Abstract: "The present study examines the existential and the posthumanist implication of Irigaray's aerological thought through a reading of Jenny Offill's Weather. Irigaray conceptualized breath as that which"" gives rhythm to the interval between self and other."" Sartre conceives of consciousness as negation- a void of freedom, but Irigaray's ontology of breath transforms the void into interval – an airy space that permits co-existence. The self is not the sovereign agent of meaning but a rhythmic being , depending on the atmosphere, one shares with plants, animals and the planetary.
Offill's Weather is a narrative enactment of atmospheric and affective selfhood. The novel dramatizes the suffocating conditions of capitalism, while also gesturing towards an ethics of care and respiration. The narrator Lizzie mirrors Irigaray's notion of the self as a porous interface between breath and the world. Irigaray's aerological self offers a phenomenology of survival that transforms existential solitude into planetary solidarity.
Key words
Luce Irigaray, Existential posthumanism, aerological ontology, Jenny Offill, relational self, ecological anxiety"
Speaker: Keerthi Shree S S
Title: Existential Bioethics And Foucaultian Technologies Of Self: A Reading Of Jennifer Egan's The Candy House ( Presentation )
Abstract: "Existential Bioethics and Foucaultian Technologies of Self: A reading of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House
The present paper conceptualises the relationship between existential bioethics and Foucault's technologies of the self through a reading of the text The Candy House. Egan envisions a futuristic world, through her invention of ""Own Your Unconscious"", where consciousness becomes a public property, archived and retrievable.
Bioethics is rooted in medical regulation and autonomy. On the contrary, existential bioethics situates ethics within the lived experience of being. In the text The Candy House, Egan envisions a tension between the authentic life and the algorithmic existence. The character of Egan navigates ethical subjectivity within surveillance capitalism and commodification of memory. Drawing on Foucauldian 'epimeleia heautou' ( care of the self ), the character of Egan’s novel resists uploading their memories, thereby embodying ethics of care. The character of Egan’s novel does not reject technological mediation but cultivates a mode of being that is existentially accountable.
To 'live the posthuman' is to engage with technology as a site of ethical creation rather than domination. The objective of the study is to propose a model of posthuman ethics that is centered on opacity, care and existential authenticity.
Key words:
Existential Bioethics, Foucault, posthumanism, digital subjectivity, Jennifer Egan, data capitalism, memory."
Speaker: Rahana P S
Title: Digital Sublime and Existential Posthumanism: A reading of Don Delillo's Zero K (Presentation).
Abstract: "Digital Sublime and Existential Posthumanism: A reading of Don Delillo's Zero K.
This paper interprets Don DeLillo's Zero K through the theoretical lens of Existential Posthumanism and the digital sublime. The cryogenic imaginary of the novel dramatizes the tension between the Heideggerian ‘being-towards-death’ and technological transcendence. To Heidegger, death gives life its structure of care (Sorge) and authenticity. The anticipation of death is an acknowledgement of one’s finitude.
‘The Convergence’, a subterranean facility in the text Zero K, offers the possibility of escaping death by freezing the body until technology revives life. ‘The Convergence’ collapses the boundaries between death and data, subjectivity and simulation. The human subject is fragmented between data, code and the desire for immortality.
Delillo's posthumanism is existential since it foregrounds anxiety, finitude and the impossibility of absolute transcendence. The novel’s cryogenic fantasy attenuates ‘Dasein’s’ existential structure, namely to be human is still to-be-toward-death, though death is deferred technologically. The insight of Heidegger that “anticipation of death individualizes Dasein” is reflected in the character Jeffrey’s reflection on the frozen bodies. The novel Zero K stages the awe and terror of digital sublime and the ontological and ethical crises of contemporary existence.
Keywords:
Existential Posthumanism, Digital sublime, technological mediation, Heidegger, temporality, finitude, immortality, Don DeLillo."
DAY 3 — 16 JANUARY 12:15 – 1:15 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 1: Existential Praxis II
Speaker: Jose Joseph
Title: From Dasein to Earth-Being: Heidegger, Existential Posthumanism and Planetary Ontology in Richard Power’s The Overstory (Presentation)
Abstract: "From Dasein to Earth-Being: Heidegger, Existential Posthumanism and Planetary Ontology in Richard Power’s The Overstory
The paper explores the paradigmatic shift from Dasein to Earth-Being through a Heideggerian existential analysis of Richard Power’s The Overstory. The basic premise of Heidegger – the question of ‘being’ is recast through the arboreal consciousness of Power’s narrative. The concept of ‘being’ is reinterpreted as relational, affective and planetary. The forest narrative of Richard Power reinterprets the Heideggerian motifs – ‘Dasein’, ‘Sorge’, ‘Gelassenheit’ and the fourfold (The Earth, The Sky, The Mortals, The Divinities) into that of ecological registers.
The novel The Overstory embodies planetary ‘Lichtung’ (clearing), wherein the ‘being’ unravels itself through interrelated dependance and ethics of care. As a theoretical constellation that emerged from Heidegger’s phenomenology – Existential posthumanism redefined the concept of ‘being’ as entanglement – an ecological assemblage of matter, affect and relation. In its network of trees, fungi, roots and human narratives, the novel offers an ethical paradigm for planetary survival.
Key words: Existential Posthumanism, Dasein, Being in the world, Sorge (care), Gelassenheit (releasement), Aletheia (un-concealment), Planetary Ethics"
Speaker: Summer LaPointe
Title: To Be and Become: Beyond Life Toward Existence in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Abstract: "To contemplate what it means to exist, one must move beyond the humanist—and even posthumanist—limitations of Life. This presentation takes Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a site for rethinking how existence is conceptualized through and beyond the frameworks of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman and Francesca Ferrando’s Philosophical Posthumanism. Dick’s post–World War Terminus world, mediated through the religion of Mercerism, depicts a species reckoning with the dissolution of boundaries between human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic. Yet even posthumanist theory, in its deconstruction of bios and embrace of zoe, remains confined to a life-centric ontology that struggles to exceed dualistic divisions of life and death.
This paper proposes a further step: a post-zoe perspective that moves from Life to Existence, from Chronos to Aion—the continuous tense of Becoming. Reading Do Androids Dream through this lens reveals how its dust, kipple, and synthetic beings enact a monistic vitality that undoes the separations of living and dying, real and artificial. Within this post-zoe framework, existence emerges not as a state but as an ongoing process of relational Being, where life and death co-constitute one another as moments of Becoming.
This presentation invites dialogue around how posthumanism might extend beyond its own life-based constraints to imagine Existence as an immanent and plural field of Becoming. (read full paper)
Format preference: Panel Session
*** Dr Diksha Tripathi ***
Speaker: Malang Cilangasan
Title: When Local Wisdom meets Sustainable Development: An ethnic Karen village in Northern Thailand
Abstract: "This project intends to investigate the complex interplay between animism and extractivism in northern Thailand. How upland communities endeavor to assert their claim and cultural relations while encountering the politics of development from modernization and globalization.
Systematically tracing the history of discourses, it has addressed that state territorialization of the upland landscape has mixed consequences for local communities. For instance, access to the forest and other relational, cosmological entities from the guidance of traditional wisdom has become problematic.
To immerse into the reality of local livelihood, the cosmology of traditional knowledge manifests a unique environment where local, communal values coexist with the statecraft of bio-governmentality.
The ethnographic methods reveal the practice of socio-ecological relationships in the ethnic Karen way of living, which has undisruptedly transmitted to generations with/through embodied experience. For instance, semi-structured interviews and intersectional observations provide contextual and structural narratives positioned historical memory, landscape, and infrastructure into the contemporary.
The study demonstrates relational dynamics between traditional and modern values have reshaped the multi-dimensional meanings in upland communities of Northern Thailand regarding the notions of resilience and well-being.
DAY 3 — 16 JANUARY 2:15 – 3:15 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 2: Artificial and Cultural Intelligence
Speaker: Deepanwita Saha
Title: Meme and Existential Posthumanism
Abstract: Posthumanism, often focuses on decentering of human subject; in existential posthumanism it is self-inquiry which is of prime focus. In this discourse, it often reconfigures selfhood in digital environment. In an era structured by constant mediation of technology and global interdependence, the discourse of existential posthumanism offers a vital framework for analysing digital cultural artefacts. Although, extensive studies are available on existentialism and posthumanism separately, but theorising how meme functions as an interface to highlight its corelation with existential posthumanism, is not yet addressed sufficiently. Emerging within a coevolving techno-being assemblage, where heterogenous components like digital systems and human beings as active participants, are mutually shaped by each other, meme often mediates in the formulation of identities, culture, through a feedback loop of creation, share and interpretation. While connecting this framework with Big history which destabilises the centrality of humans, my paper examines how meme simultaneously trivializes and deepens the existential awareness; in one hand, it humorously encodes cultural and ontological anxiety and it also foregrounds evolutionary continuity. So, meme becomes an interface to stage the act of digital dwelling. In this networked digital world, self exists not only as embodied presence but as distributed traces and communicative acts. This paper concludes that meme through the lens of existential posthumanism serves as an active participant in the process of posthuman becoming. Thereby, existential posthumanism is a relational lived process in the contemporary age. For the theoretical underpinning I will draw ideas from famous Harraway, Bradotti, Heideggar, and other. (read full paper)
Speaker: Prerana Sana
Title: Paper presentation topic: "When Companionship Turns Obsession: Affective Autonomy and Emotional Collapse in Posthuman Cinema"
Abstract: "This article explores emotional autonomy and affective collapse in contemporary posthuman cinema, focusing on M3GAN (2022), Subservience (2024), and T.I.M. (2023). Drawing on posthuman theory, affect studies, and psychoanalysis, it examines how AI companions dramatize the consequences of emotion exceeding human control. The study situates these films within a broader trajectory from earlier AI narratives, such as Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014), tracing the shift from cognitive intelligence to the overproduction of affect, where empathy transforms into obsession.
Through close textual and scene-based analysis, the article demonstrates that AI affect reflects human emotional dependency, projecting desire, care, and control onto machines. Psychoanalytic readings, informed by Freud and Lacan, reveal the uncanny intimacy of AI, where obsessive attachment externalizes repressed human desire and destabilizes identity. Attention is also given to the gendered coding of affective labor, highlighting how care becomes coercive when emotion is unreciprocated.
The study proposes a framework of affective autonomy, describing the capacity of beings—human or artificial—to experience and act upon emotion independently of prescriptive control. It further argues that contemporary posthuman cinema reconceptualizes ethics as relational, contingent, and distributed, and that cinematic techniques materialize emotion for the spectator. Ultimately, this research contributes to understanding the ethical, emotional, and philosophical stakes of human–machine entanglements, revealing the risks, responsibilities, and radical potential of autonomous feeling."
Speaker: Violina Kalita
Title: Extending the Self: AI, Authorship, and Existential Becoming in Appupen’s Dream Machine
Abstract: "If the collective milieu of this century could be defined by a single adjective, few would capture it better than “data-driven.” In an algorithmic culture where “hallucinations” no longer pertain only to human consciousness, where the very notion of consciousness is debated, and where language and storytelling are starting to be co-authored by more-than-human entities, our understanding of individual, collective, and planetary existence has become profoundly unstable. The rise of artificial intelligence and its deep integration into our quotidian life has opened new terrains of ethical and ontological inquiry.
Donna Haraway talks about how ""the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion "" (67), it thus becomes crucial to examine how cultural texts negotiate these boundaries. The paper will study Appupen and Daudet’s The Dream Machine : AI and the Real World, a graphic text that experiments with AI-generated storytelling, through the lens of Indian philosophical thought. For this purpose, A.K. Ramanujan’s essay “Is there a Indian Way of Thinking”, which posits the the Indian self is inherently plural, inconsistent and context-dependent, will be used as a methodological framework of study. By juxtaposing the figures of SuperHugo, Hugo, and the AI he creates, and by analyzing the narratological continuities and ruptures between human- and AI-generated segments of the text, this paper explores how Indian posthumanism foregrounds multiplicity, contradiction, and relationality as central to being. It argues that the text invites an existential reflection on co-creation and control and on what it means to make self and make world in an age defined by data and intelligent machines. (read full paper)
Keywords: AI, Indian Posthumanism, Self, Narrativity, Graphic Narrative."
Speaker: Humaira Mariyam B.
Title: Beyond Human Exceptionalism in AI-Enhanced Posthuman Language Classroom
Abstract: "Situated within the posthuman framework, this study reconsiders educational practices shaped by digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Adopting Braidotti’s posthuman stance, it attempts to decentre human exceptionalism and foreground the interconnected, relational agencies of human, non-human, material, and technological elements in education, by analysing AI tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs) as active participants in the learning assemblage and their relationality with the learners.
This qualitative study examines the potential of LLMs in promoting networked, nomadic learning among tertiary-level learners in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms. The study employs Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) model and the theory of Connectivism, reinterpreting both through a posthuman lens. The role of the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) is redefined to include non-human mediators like LLMs, and learning is exemplified as a nomadic, connected process across human-nonhuman and human-machine networks.
This study probes how LLMs support learners and teachers in creating inclusive and academically responsible learning environments, and what the pedagogical implications of accommodating LLMs in the learning assemblage are, by analysing the semi-structured interviews, screen-recordings, teachers’ observation notes and the technical reports gathered from twenty English language students from a public university in India. The findings affirmed that the rational use of AI, guided by teachers, can promote its ethical use while contributing to the facilitation of inclusive and academically responsible learning environments. It was found that the intervention enabled inquiry-based learning, critical thinking, communication, digital literacy, and research skills. The results revealed how human-AI assemblages prompt posthuman pedagogical “becomings” that challenge traditional humanist approaches to language learning. It also implied the need to develop more effective, nomadic teaching strategies to incorporate AI and LLMs into teaching and learning practices that embrace the transformative potential of more-than-human educational assemblages.
DAY 3 — 16 JANUARY 2:15 – 3:15 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 2: Medical Considerations
Speaker: Debayan Das
Title: Vibrant Bacillus and the Humanist Ideal: Cholera and the Unmaking of the Bengal Renaissance
Abstract: "This article interrogates the cholera epidemics of colonial Bengal, specifically during the times of Bengal Renaissance through a posthumanist theoretical lens, staging a critical intervention at the intersection of environmental history, literary studies, and the history of medical science. It posits that the Bengal Renaissance, with its profound investment in humanist ideals of reason, reform, and bodily sovereignty, operated within a fundamentally anthropocentric paradigm; that was radically destabilized and jeopardized by the material agency of the Vibrio cholerae. Employing concepts of vibrant materialism and actor-network theory, this analysis de-centers the human to recast the epidemic as a phenomenon of a more-than-human assemblage. This assemblage entwined the vibrio’s vitality with the estuarine ecologies of the Bay of Bengal, colonial hydraulic infrastructure, and transcultural literary representations. (read full paper)
By reading colonial medical reports alongside literary texts that register the dissolution of the bounded human body, this study exposes the limitations of the Renaissance's humanist project. Ultimately, it argues that a posthumanist reading does not merely supplement but fundamentally re-narrates the period, revealing how the epoch's central tensions were co-constituted by the lively and unruly non-human actants that its intellectual traditions struggled to assimilate.
Keywords: Actor-Network theory, Bengal Renaissance, Colonialism, Medical Humanities, Posthumanism"
Speaker: Ashish Kumar Pandey
Title: Panel Presentation- Existential Becoming and Corporeal Revival in Priya Sarukkai Chhabria’s Clone
Abstract: "Panel presentation- The Renaissance, meaning “to be born again” (re-nasci), is embodied in the posthuman age by cloning—a form of rebirth achieved through biotechnological advancement. This paper aims to examine existentialist aspects of such revivalist technologies in Priya Sarukkai Chhabria’s Clone (2018). The novel's cloned subject, 14/54/G, embodies a forced corporeal revival—a technological “rebirth” that introduces a new physical self but strategically directs its consciousness to trace the Original’s final speech. The clone's existence rests in undoing the Original's legacy, highlighting how the authoritarian Global Community attempts to contain this existential transformation within the confines of genetic predetermination. This engineered revival lays the foundation for a critique of anthropocentric and dualistic frameworks.
The clone’s enforced purpose triggers an existential angst when her programmed “actuality” breaks down. Her consciousness begins to retrieve the Original’s suppressed memories, and she develops traits “not characteristic of clones,” specifically the capacity to imagine, feel, and dream. This process of “making of the self” is a resistance to the authority of the Originals (a group). The paper explores this negotiation between inherited identity and emergent subjectivity, showing how Clone engages existential questions about authenticity and meaning within a world that denies her intrinsic worth.
Ultimately, the novel’s narrative challenges the idea of linear temporality associated with Humanism and embodies the concept of continuous becoming. The memory shifts of 14/54/G are emblematic of multispecies becoming, weaving history and the perspective of other species into her present consciousness, thus dismantling the Eurocentric idea of temporality. Through this fluid subjectivity, Clone negotiates a new kind of selfhood and “makes world” by asserting that the birthright to be human is not genetic inheritance but an ethical praxis rooted in continuous transformation and relationality." (read full paper)
Speaker: Dr Pritikana Karmakar
Title: Title for panel session presentation: "Beyond Technomedical Victories: Counternarratives of Ebola and Eco-Compassion In Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men"
Abstract: "Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (2017, trans. 2021) is a study in cavalier attitudes and destructive patterns of human behaviour resulting in the devastating Ebola pandemic in West Africa circa 2014-16. This study proposes that Tadjo’s novel employs counterstorytelling in the context of healthcare to portray the primaeval relationship between humans and nature, an unbroken symphony that we have forgotten how to listen to. Such a sophic amnesia is at the heart of the uncontrolled entropy of the Anthropocene, which is precisely what the Ebola outbreak has unveiled in Africa. The article argues that In the Company of Men is a clarion call for Bernard Stiegler’s vision of the Neganthropocene, the age of spiritual care and cure that must check the chaos of the Anthropocene if humanity is to prevail with dignity. Tadjo uses a multitude of perspectives, human and nonhuman, as well as elements from the Greek chorus and African oral narrative tradition to posit an Afrocentric counternarrative to the West’s colonising of indigenous medicine and related traditions. The article incorporates Rita Charon’s concepts of reflexivity, reciprocity and creativity in narrative medicine to show that the various voices in the novel create an alternate, or rather, a more inclusive reality beyond human knowledge and value structures. Through Tadjo’s vision, ecocentric compassion becomes a way to counter the deafening void of cultural knowledge and caution against the technoscientific rhetoric of battles and victories as a marker of human progress.
Keywords: Ebola, Anthropocene, ecological exploitation, Afrocentric, narrative medicine."
DAY 3 — 16 JANUARY 3:30 – 4:30 Parallel Sessions: PC Mahalanobis 3: Workshop
**** Rosalie Purvis ****
DAY 3 — 14 JANUARY 3:30 – 4:30 Parallel Sessions: AK Basak 3: Workshop
Speaker: Pratyay Raha
Title: Sensing Entanglements – Field Recording Techniques from a Posthumanist Perspective
Abstract: "This workshop will introduce field recording as both a creative and critical practice for attuning to the agencies of human and more-than-human worlds. Drawing on posthumanist theory and my learning from the posthuman educator course, participants will actively investigate how sound connects us to the multispecies and material entanglements that shape our environments.
Participants will learn to use hydrophones to access the submerged sonic realms of aquatic ecosystems, contact microphones to sense the vibrations within soil and swamps, omnidirectional microphones for immersive 360-degree explorations of environmental soundscapes, and shotgun microphones to isolate and focus on individual sources within complex habitats. These techniques will provide both practical skills and new ways to inquire into the diverse agencies that emerge in posthumanist thinking.
Through a combination of hands-on activities and reflective discussion, the workshop will invite participants to consider how recording technologies shape what we can perceive, and how sound art can give voice and agency to entities beyond the human. Together, we will explore questions of ethics, responsibility, and situated listening—developing strategies for documenting entangled worlds and fostering a deeper appreciation for interconnectedness.
Open to artists, researchers, educators, and anyone interested in sound, environment, or posthuman inquiry, this workshop will require no prior experience—just curiosity and a willingness to engage in experimental listening practices."
Speaker: Dominic Bucci
Title: Posthuman Praxis: Using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to Optimize Scholarly Performance
Abstract: "As we enter a posthuman era in which biotechnology, wearables, and data systems intertwine with human consciousness, a key question arises: how can we practice posthumanism? Beyond theory, posthuman praxis invites embodied experiments that explore what posthuman life actually feels like. How can technological feedback help us refine focus, energy, and learning in real time?
This workshop introduces the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM). Originally designed for diabetes care, the CGM can now be repurposed as a tool for understanding and optimizing our own cognitive and emotional performance. Drawing on insights from Hunter Allen’s Training + Competing with a Continuous Glucose Monitor (2025), Jessie Inchauspé’s Glucose Revolution (2022), and new studies on non-diabetic use, we’ll examine how real-time glucose feedback reveals the body’s energetic rhythms as living data. Participants will see how glucose stability relates to mental clarity, mood, and creative flow, and how a simple wearable can become a mirror for self-regulation and awareness. The CGM becomes not just a medical device, but a bridge—an interface for experiencing the body as part of a larger digital ecology. In this light, the cyborg scholar is not science fiction but a living experiment in posthuman praxis, where data and consciousness meet in daily life." (read full paper)
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Unscheduled:
Speaker: Debosmita Routh
Title: Flesh to Code: Theorizing a Cyborgian Future
Abstract: "What happens when the human body – the material marker of identity and agency – is deemed to be obsolete? This provocative proclamation by the Australian artist, Stelarc, formed the very basis of his performances where he radically changed and challenged the biological boundaries of his ‘natural’ body. This leads to urgent questions about the nature of embodiment, the anthropocentricity of consciousness, and an anxiety about humanity’s future. Keeping Stelarc’s performances and works as a backdrop, I wish to extend his views into cosmopolitan realms and trans-species dimensions by proposing certain hypotheses that reframe cyborgity as a space for innovation.
First, I position cyborgs as not merely human-technology assemblages but rather as the assemblages of technology with any biological organism. This challenges the traditional anthropocentric view of technological advancement and widens it to include the entire biosphere. Second, I wish to position cyborg consciousness as a site of evolution of plural and distributed ontologies. Identity then will emerge as a phenomenon generated through techno-social interactions rather than the inherent essence of being. Building on this, my third hypothesis positions the cyborg body as an interface for cross-species understanding and empathy by translating non-human sensory experiences into human-intelligible feelings and vice-versa. My fourth and last hypothesis intends to position cyborgs as agents of evolution that shift focus from traditional Darwinian models of evolution to technologically-backed evolution beyond genetic constraints. This positions technology as an evolutionary force bringing with it questions of cyborg ethics, rights, and survival.
To study these hypotheses, interdisciplinary methodologies and experiments are required, the ideas of which are currently under active development."
Speaker: Niladri Chatterjee
Title: Rebirth Without Return: Diasporic Unbelonging and Posthuman Becoming in Contemporary Indian Fiction
Abstract: "This paper explores the notion of rebirth without return as a mode of posthuman becoming in contemporary Indian diasporic fiction, particularly in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. While the European Renaissance celebrated humanist self-fashioning as mastery over the world, these postcolonial narratives articulate a different kind of renaissance—one marked by loss, exile, and existential transformation. Through the wandering, fractured subjectivities of Mukherjee’s and Lahiri’s protagonists, the paper interrogates the humanist ideal of rooted identity and proposes instead a posthuman ontology of flux: the self as a continually reconstituted assemblage of grief, memory, and migration.
Drawing upon Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and posthumanist philosophies of becoming (Ferrando, Braidotti, Banerji), the paper redefines diaspora as an affective process of ontological re-nasci—a rebirth that does not seek return but embraces perpetual becoming. The diasporic self, in this framework, ceases to be a bounded human subject and becomes a relational node within planetary affective networks, where belonging is replaced by metamorphosis. By situating these literary texts within the context of existential posthumanism, the paper reimagines the diasporic condition as an ethical invitation to live without home, identity, or telos—to be, instead, in continual transformation.
Ultimately, it argues that the posthuman “Renaissance” in Indian fiction is not a return to human centrality but a radical reimagining of self and world as co-evolving, ever-unfinished, and profoundly entangled processes of becoming."
Speaker: Priya Roy
Title: Being with the Earth: Existential Becoming in Ecological Entanglements
Abstract: The central concept is “being with the earth” as an existential posthuman framework for rethinking subjectivity, ethics and ecological practice in the Anthropocene. Moving beyond “only- human” models of existence, the argument reframes the self as a relational node constituted through continuous interactions with non-human life material processes and socio-technical systems. Drawing on posthuman and continental philosophies of “becoming” with a focus on Gilles Deluze, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Harraway. It aims to develop an ontological and ethical account that ties existential transformation to concrete ethical responsibilities. The idea is to combine philosophical analysis with ecological readings to show how alternative modes of knowing and living like community stewardship; regenerative practices and multispecies design represent “being within everyday” formula. It will address common objections like romanticization of nature and dilution of human agency by clarifying how relational subjectivity redistributes responsibility and reveals structural drivers of ecological injustice. Ultimately it proposes to argue that adopting a “being with” orientation can reconfigure pedagogy, policy, and grassroots praxis toward reciprocal, resilient socio-ecological systems. The contribution aims to furnish both conceptual tools and practical pathways for a pluralistic, decolonial posthumanism that makes self and the world together.
Speaker: Thomas Mical
Title: "Dreamscanning in Sci-Fi Beyond Cognitive Capitalism"
Abstract: "Cinema may be a type of dreaming, and yet in cognitive capitalism it is even our dreams which are scanned, excavated, optimised. In pursuing multiple case studies from sci-fi cinema (like Inception, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Vanilla Sky), we track the emergent posthuman technologies of cinematic dreamwork of the future – reformatted by prescient analysis of the timeless ancient Indian lens of 4-part model of sleep and time-consciousness.
The madman is the dreamer awake (Freud); capitalism marks the end of sleep (Crary). Between these is the promise of dreamscanning. Posthumanist technology in sci-fi promises full access to our dreams (for ourselves and others) and details a growing range of complex dream operations (from scanning to storage to infiltration to extraction). This paper triangulates recent sci-fi filmic fabulations of Posthuman future technologies within medieval Indian Vedic-Trantric traditions, and existential word-building through posthuman dream technologies."
Speaker: Dr. Jaya Sarkar
Title: Collective Healing and Communities: Exploring Existential Posthumanism and Ecofeminist Entanglements
Abstract: The proposed presentation will demonstrate how the 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror thriller film Bird Box, directed by Susanne Bier, critiques human existentialism and focuses on a relationship of intimacy configured between humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans. By engaging with Rosi Braidotti’s theories of posthuman feminism and Timothy Morton’s theories on posthuman ecology, this proposed presentation argues that the posthumans in Bird Box strive to integrate into the environment, resulting in a loss of individual subjectivity and a radical uncertain openness to the world. The proposed presentation will conceptually outline the posthumanist, ecofeminist and existential theories to arrive at posthuman existentialism, with which Bird Box is analyzed in order to get a critical reflection on the emerging reconceptualization of connectedness, entanglements, and belonging through scientific, literary, and cultural interfaces. The proposed presentation will further demonstrate how Susanne Bier deftly portrays, in a post-apocalyptic setting, the characters who forge new connections with the world materially and affectively. The co-constitution of different species and non-humans through mutual connections in Bird Box forges a posthuman reality that blurs the human/non-human, disability/ability, and nature/culture distinctions. The posthumans become entangled with the non-humans of the planet and open up a passage for a praxis of care and collective healing. The proposed presentation will conclude with the significance of a posthuman existentialist approach, which proposes a value system that is integral to understanding the affects and to emphasizing the accountability of humans and knowledge practices towards the environment.