Description
After the World Wars and Einstein’s breakthrough Theory of Relativity, after the invention of computers, in a time when humans first walked on the moon, we learned to see inanimate objects as more alive than we thought, to see animals as persons and ourselves as machines, and to see the impact of all of this on our fragile spaceship: Earth. In this course, we will explore four movements in post-war thinking referred to collectively as “the New Materialisms.” These include object-oriented ontologies, animal studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism, and those who contribute to these conversations are slowly reshaping our world by questioning even our most basic assumptions about it.