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Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
Jul-Dec 2026
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Introduction
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Dedication
~ SUKHENDU DAS (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026).
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Editorial
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Edito's Note
~ SUKHENDU DAS (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:I-IX)
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Articles
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Jean de La Fontaine's Fables and Staging Affect Across Species in the Anthropocene
~ Authored By - SUZANNE LALONDE (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:01-21)
Abstract View Article PDFMotivated by the American Psychological Association's "Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change”, this article rereads Jean de La Fontaine's fables through the lenses of affect theory and posthumanism. It argues that his fables offer elucidation about affective reactions, such as empathy, affective absence, and false affect, which can help account for persistent failures of human responsiveness in the Anthropocene. This article also demonstrates that La Fontaine's fables stage affective entanglements in which human and non-human entities become interwoven. The fabulist's animal characters do not simply mirror human interiority. They expose affective processes that unfold between readers and animal characters. This study further contends that his fables provoke an unsettling selfanalysis of human affect, not primarily through anthropomorphism but through a form of zoomorphism, as readers creatively participate in an embodied staging of affect.
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Arboreal Ruderality: Vegetal Invasion and Ecological Osmosis as Told by Tree of Heaven
~ Authored By - SYDNEY KALE (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:22-51)
Abstract View Article PDFInvasive plants are becoming more invasive, more prominent in the spaces humans inhabit, and more agentic. The dominant, antagonistic discourses surrounding invasive plants and their ecologies are not working if the goal is to achieve balanced and functional relationships. The tendency to ascribe human morality to invasive behaviors overshadows the amoralistic ecological origins of a plant’s presence in an ecosystem. This article attempts to represent vegetal invasives on their own terms within a narrative that favors relationality over morality, as storied by Tree of Heaven. Lively ethnography, a methodology of engaging with multispecies and more-than-human storytelling as meaningful and world-making, opens new conceptual ground for understanding and responding to invasive ecologies. This article evokes phenomenological and posthumanist thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Thom van Dooren, Anna Tsing, and Jochen Bockemühl to reconceptualize invasive ecologies. Phenomenological and narrative research, incorporating first-person, subjective knowledge of Tree of Heaven, employs multispecies storytelling to decenter the human within invasive ecology discourse. The concepts of the ruderal plant - a plant with the capacity to inhabit disturbed and largely unsuitable landscapes, such as those present during early-stage ecological succession - and ecological osmosis presented in this paper moves discussions of invasive species away from blind contempt to better understand the whys of their emergence. The narrative that arises is one of fluidity, examining the parallels between water and ruderal governances and ecological movements. Tree of Heaven as a case study demonstrates how engaging with multispecies storytelling as a mode of listening can alter how we know invasive plants and how we talk about and with them.
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We Have Never Seen Alone: Low Vision, Dust and Posthuman Perception
~ Authored By - YANINA CARRIZO (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:52-77)
Abstract View Article PDFThis paper develops a posthuman theory of perception through multispecies encounters with dust, low vision, and microscopy. Drawing on feminist new materialism, particularly Karen Barad's concepts of intra-action and diffraction and Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, alongside multispecies ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Melbourne kindergarten, the article argues that perception is not a stable human capacity located within the body. Rather, seeing emerges relationally through ongoing entanglements among bodies, technologies, atmospheres, light, and matter.
Building from earlier work on child–earth relations and dust pedagogies, the paper advances a distinct theoretical intervention centred on perception and sensory life. Rather than approaching low vision through deficit-based frameworks, partial vision is positioned as an epistemological and methodological opening that reveals the constitutive incompleteness of all seeing. Low vision becomes a way of unsettling assumptions of perceptual mastery, objectivity, and sensory autonomy, while foregrounding perception as embodied, situated, and materially mediated.
The paper further theorises microscopes not as instruments that simply extend human sight, but as co-perceptual participants that actively shape what becomes visible. Through children's collective encounters with dust under magnification, perception emerges as social, speculative, and more-than-human. Dust transforms from overlooked residue into textured microworlds that invite microbial imaginaries, relational thinking, and shared acts of world-making.
Situating these encounters within posthumanities, disability studies, sensory studies, and feminist new materialist scholarship, the article reconceptualises perception as a distributed, ethical, and technologically mediated event rather than a representational act of a sovereign observer. Ultimately, it argues that perception has always been collective, partial, and multispecies: we have never seen alone.
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Posthuman Vegetality: Plant Agency and Ecological Entanglements in Stephen King's Horror
~ Authored By - SRIDHEEPIKA V S (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:078-101)
Abstract View Article PDFThe ecological crises of the Anthropocene have intensified literary and critical attention to nonhuman agency, compelling a fundamental reassessment of long-held assumptions about human dominance over the natural world. This article argues that vegetation in Stephen King’s fiction functions not merely as atmospheric backdrop but as an autonomous ecological force that actively shapes narrative space, human perception, and the conditions of survival. Reading three of King’s works, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), In the Tall Grass (2012, co-written with Joe Hill), and The Stand (1978; expanded 1990), through the intersecting frameworks of posthuman ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and vegetal horror, this study identifies a distinctive and formally coherent narrative mode in King’s work: vegetal horror achieved through spatial disorientation and environmental engulfment rather than through monstrous aggression. King’s forests, fields, and post-apocalyptic botanical reclamation do not predatorially attack their human characters; they disorient, ensnare, and transform them, staging the profound entanglement of human and nonhuman life. By positioning vegetation as a narrative protagonist rather than a passive setting, King’s horror subverts anthropocentric hierarchies and articulates urgent posthuman ecological concerns. Situating King within both the American Gothic tradition and the emerging scholarship on vegetal horror, the article demonstrates that his ecological imagination constitutes a sustained and underexamined contribution to the posthuman literary imagination of the Anthropocene.
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Posthuman Desire in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction: Embodiment, Technocapitalism, and Relational Co-emergence
~ Authored By - FÁTIMA SILVA (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:102-124)
Abstract View Article PDFThis essay examines how Jeanette Winterson mobilises posthuman desire as a critical and analytical category capable of destabilising the humanist imaginaries that have shaped technoscientific culture since cybernetics and artificial intelligence emerged as cultural forces in the mid-twentieth century. Its specific intervention is to argue that desire - a distributed, materially embedded, ontologically unstable practice - is a more adequate analytical category than affect or intimacy alone, foregrounding the productive, world-making dimension of posthuman entanglement rather than its merely relational aspect. Through close readings of Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) and The Stone Gods (2007), the essay argues that Winterson rejects both the transhumanist dream of disembodied consciousness and the technocapitalist reduction of intimacy to programmable affection, advancing instead a posthuman ethics grounded in vulnerability, hybrid embodiment, and relational co-emergence. Grounded in feminist materialism, queer theory, and critical posthumanism - particularly Haraway, Braidotti, Barad, Preciado, Hayles, Berlant, and Halberstam - the essay reads these frameworks not as a sequential inventory but as intersecting and occasionally divergent positions that Winterson's fiction mediates. In Frankissstein the tension between Ry Shelley's embodied becoming and Victor Stein's disembodiment project exposes the stakes of posthuman subjectivity, while Ron Lord's sexbots dramatise the technocapitalist capture of affective existence. The Stone Gods extends this critique into a speculative ecology where the cyclical collapse of worlds renders the "human” a precarious historical effect rather than an ontological ground, and the evolving relationship between Billie and Spike shows posthuman desire to be constituted not through optimisation or similarity but through shared exposure, risk, and the capacity to respond to radical otherness. The essay's principal contribution is to show that Winterson's formal choices - ironic intertextuality, iterative structure, speculative ecology - do not merely illustrate existing theory but enact modes of posthumanist argumentation that press those frameworks where theoretical accounts leave off.
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Retrieving Bryant's pan-mechanist machine ontology: Entanglement, function, and "mechanism in general"
~ Authored By - EAMON REID (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:125-153)
Abstract View Article PDFBetween publishing The Democracy of Objects and Onto-Cartography, Levi Bryant introduced the notion of pan-mechanism or "mechanism in general". Since these publications, powers-based and dispositionalist ontologies have been gaining traction in the Continental tradition. The machine ontologies of Bryant, Kleinherenbrink, and Ardoline use powers and dispositions to explain what machines do. Machines possess dispositional properties that allow them to affect and be affected in distinctive ways. This ontology is both non-anthropocentric and post-human as machinic operations occur (or fail to occur) even if humans are not around to experience them. I argue that retrieving panmechanism allows us to talk about interconnection and interrelation without undermining the machinic individualities of humans and nonhumans. Pan-mechanism also facilitates inter-philosophical dialogue between substantialist and relationist philosophies. Panmechanism describes the general fact that the machinic functions aim at producing the new and maintaining machinic identities. Often, we may know or infer some of the machines involved in an instance of production, but we may not know all the machines involved in the act of generation. Pan-mechanism is then grounded in a pan-machinism. I argue that Bryant’s ontology can be seen as a hybrid two-dimensional one that is simultaneously relationist about interactions and is substantialist regarding machines. I argue that this two-dimensional metaphysics is worth retrieving, for it can serve as a metamethodological guide for our investigations into the world qua "mechanosphere".
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Matters of the Metaverse: Dematerialization, Performativity and the Crisis of Identity
~ Authored By - NEHA SOI (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:154-178)
Abstract View Article PDFIn the contemporary age of digital revolution, there is a growing global aspiration to inhabit the virtual space as completely as possible, and to replicate or substitute human actions, transactions and existence with digital counterparts. The state of material embodiment, which was hitherto seen as pivotal for performativity, has been supplanted with a strong rejection of materiality. The idea of presence, which was a crucial aspect of agency, stands displaced by that of simulated presence. A dematerialization of the self is increasingly pursued, and presented as a desirable state of being. While often celebrated as liberatory, such dematerialization is neither neutral nor transcendental. Instead, it is embedded within techno-capitalist structures that commodify identity and experience (Zuboff 9). The veracity of the claims towards freedom, empowerment and equality, so often associated with the metaverse, then needs to be ascertained. This paper critically examines the cultural and ontological implications of this shift, arguing that the metaverse reconfigures agency, embodiment and representation in ways that demand skepticism rather than celebration. Drawing upon theorists such as Judith Butler and Jean Baudrillard among others, the paper situates virtual identity within broader debates on simulation, performativity and posthuman subjectivity.
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The Queer Inheritance of the Posthuman: Reproductive Futurity in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me
~ Authored By - SIDDHARTHA DEY (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:179-203)
Abstract View Article PDF"We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child," writes Lee Edelman in his 2004 work on queer theory and the death drive. Taking this formulation as its point of departure, this article examines the centrality of the Child in Ian McEwan's novel Machines Like Me (2019) and argues that this implied telos places the humanoid robot Adam in a structurally queer position. By analysing the novel's politics of "reproductive futurism," the paper shows how Adam- through his non-reproductive pursuit of pleasure and experience, and his moral and intellectual superiority—not only stands in opposition to the heteronormative domestic order of Charlie and Miranda but also destabilises its humanist assumptions. To contextualise this argument, the paper reads the novel alongside McEwan's earlier work Enduring Love (1997), where the explicitly queer character Jed Parry similarly unsettles the domestic stability of the childless couple Joe and Clarissa. Despite differences in ontology and narrative context, as the study reveals, both novels deploy analogous strategies of containment. Finally, the paper argues that the sidelining of Adam through destruction and the marginalisation of Jed Parry through psychiatric pathologisation function as expressions of the same futurist logic that treats queer positions as failed—due to their inability, in Sara Ahmed's terms, to "return the gift of the line" - and therefore disposable. In tracing this continuity, the paper demonstrates how post-human figures such as cyborgs and intelligent machines inherit a historically queer position within humanist regimes of futurity, where lives or systems that disrupt the heteronormative order of reproductive continuity are rendered easily expendable.
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From Decentering to Dwelling: Ecopoiesis and the Ethics of Ecological Participation
~ Authored By - MUHAMMAD JALIL ARIF (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:204-235)
Abstract View Article PDFThis paper critically re-examines the dominant environmentalphilosophical imperative to overcome anthropocentrism in light of contemporary posthuman and relational turns. While ecological and posthuman discourses have productively challenged human domination and exceptionalism by emphasizing entanglement, relationality, and more-than-human agency, they often retain a residual abstraction. This abstraction lies in treating "the human" as a unified moral and conceptual problem. This paper argues that this framing risks obscuring the differentiated, situated, and reflexive capacities through which responsibility becomes possible and that the attempts to "decenter human" altogether prove both conceptually paradoxical and practically self-undermining. To develop an ethic that genuinely cultivates ecological responsibility, recognition of humansituatedness and human capacities of moral discernment are inescapable, since we cannot think, evaluate, or care except from within human modes of experiencing and understanding. Rather than seeking to transcend anthropocentrism through decentering human, this paper proposes a shift from the logic of centrism to that of participation. Drawing on process-relational philosophy and ecological thought, this paper proposes the concept of ecopoiesis-the relational making of a shared dwelling-place or home. Ecopoiesis reframes ethical life in terms of cultivating responsible participation in the ongoing co-creation of ecological relations. In this view, humansituatedness is not an obstacle to ecological ethics but its very condition of possibility. The task is neither to dissolve the human category into undifferentiated networks nor to reinstate human absolute dominance but to reconceptualize human reflexivity, moral discernment, and cultural capacity as modes of ecological participation. By repositioning responsibility within relational processes rather than abstract moral hierarchies, this shift-from centrism to participation, from collective guilt to differentiated responsiveness, from critique to renewal-offers a constructive contribution to posthuman environmental thought and offers a vision of "ecological civilization" grounded in ecopoietic practice.
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Hypercapacity and Human Redundancy in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.
~ Authored By - EMILY REIFF (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:236-259)
Abstract View Article PDFThis article explores discourses of sickness and health, as well as the range of embodiments that extend from disability to normativity and into the realm of what Samuel Yates terms "hypercapacity." The concept of hypercapacity influences the social construction of disability, which informs and reflects ableist ideologies which elevate what Rosemary Garland-Thomson describes as "normate" identities. This "preference for able-bodiedness" can define "the baseline by which" one is determined to be human and, for the purpose of this analysis, grievable (Siebers). Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) highlights dangers inherent to overvaluing genetically enhanced bodies, leading to new generations of children who are forced into conditions of non-normative embodiment and diminishing life value. The narrative challenges the idea of "normative" bodies, which are socially and economically desirable, as bioengineering ("lifting") creates children that Yates would describe as hypercapacitated due to their purportedly advanced intellectual capabilities. The text also depicts a society in which human beings are becoming increasingly redundant and replaceable in the labor market. The social drive for perfection is coupled with human replaceability, which extends to a child who has been debilitated by bioengineering. She experiences diminished cultural valuation due to the textual implication that disability has so diminished her status as a grievable subject that she may be replaced by a highly advanced android that can mimic the child and “continue” her in a healthier state. I argue Ishiguro's novel explores the potential for economic and philosophical deterioration of life value in a world where everyone and everything is upgradeable. .
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Language as Ecological Design: Affordances, Objects, and Posthuman Meaning
~ Authored By - TAKUYA INOUE (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:260-298)
Abstract View Article PDFThis study presents a comprehensive approach to relational ontology by treating language use as a form of ecological design, conceptualized as a process grounded in affordances that arise from interactions among humans, nonhumans, objects, and environments. Prevailing theories of meaning in linguistics and the humanities have relied predominantly on human-centered models of representation, often neglecting materiality, action, and nonhuman agency, and thereby limiting the framework’s capacity to account for meaning as a distributed, ecological phenomenon. Drawing on ecological psychology and critical posthumanism, this study develops a relational ontology in which affordances are real possibilities for action, existing independently of human perception or intention. Objects are reconceptualized as stabilized bundles of actualized affordances, realized through affordance actualization, the transition from latent potential to accessible environmental structures. Affordance perceptualization is the process by which signifying practices render specific affordances salient for coordinated action. Meaning is thus understood not as mental representation or symbolic content, but as the configuration of relations that guide perception and action. Within this framework, language is reconceived as a form of perceptual design rather than a medium for transmitting meaning or information. Linguistic constructions selectively foreground certain affordances while constraining others, thereby redistributing agency within ecological fields. Furthermore, a corpus analysis of seven nouns from enTenTen21 (Sketch Engine; approximately 52 billion tokens) demonstrates, through a two-level examination of syntactic and semantic collocational patterns, how lexicogrammatical distributions reflect affordance-type distinctions. Thus, this study contributes to posthuman semantics by offering a transdisciplinary framework for rethinking meaning beyond anthropocentric models.
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From Background to Foreground: Elevating Moss in Critical Plant Studies and Conservation Ethics
~ Authored By - ANDREA NATAN FELTRIN (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:299-324)
Abstract View Article PDFMoss is commonplace, yet it is seldom treated as an object of sustained ethical attention, and I take that ordinary disappearance as a problem for conservation ethics: value still tends to follow size, mobility, charisma, visible expression, economic use, or forms of agency that can be compared readily with human and other animal capacities, while moss matters ecologically but falls outside this grammar of attention. I therefore use mossy entanglement to describe its surface-bound and moisture-dependent participation in shared worlds, for the agency at issue is infrastructural: through attachment, water retention, substrate change, carbon dynamics, microhabitat formation, and refuge making, moss alters the conditions under which other beings persist, and neither intention nor sovereign action is required for those effects to matter. The argument moves among bryophyte biology, philosophical analysis, and the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve in Chile: biological research supplies the material basis of mossy entanglement, while critical plant studies, posthumanism, and multispecies justice establish the conceptual dispute, and Cape Horn places that dispute under practical pressure because bryophytes there have changed biodiversity assessment, environmental education, ecotourism, and biocultural conservation. The case hence supports an ethics of habitability concerned not only with organisms, but also with substrates, microclimates, ecological relations, and the small shelters through which a shared world remains liveable.
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Reconfiguring the Consumption of Digitalism and Human Subjectivity in Jennifer Egan's The Candy House (2022)
~ Authored By - MANDEEP SINGH & ANUPAMA VOHRA (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:325-344)
Abstract View Article PDFMoss is commonplace, yet it is seldom treated as an object of sustained ethical attention, and I take that ordinary disappearance as a problemThe unprecedented expansion of digitalism in the contemporary age explicitly manifests in the representation of the self, political and virtual environment, educational system and knowledge, cultural production, surveillance and datafication, communication and emotional life. Digital tools have become crucial to human existence and actively disrupt the traditional boundaries between offline and online interactions. As such, digitalism targets and influences the user behaviour in an automatic and pervasive manner. The word 'digitalism' refers to a 'digital land' that not only changes according to the production and reception of new narratives but also reconfigures the condition of human in the 'techno-cultural' realm owing to consumption of digital tools. In doing so, this article argues that the ill-considered consumption of digital tools incites user dependency on digitalism and uninterrupted engagement of human with digitalism fosters an obsessive reliance on digital platforms as Jennifer Egan projects in her novel The Candy House (2022). Through the technological apparatuses such as 'Mandala Cube,' 'Own Your Unconscious' and 'Collective Consciousness,' the novel demystifies the consumption of human subjectivity in a digital space. Drawing on theoretical insights from posthumanism and new materialism, this article illustrates the transformation of human in a world mediated by digitalism.
REFLECTION PIECE / EXPERIMENTAL WRITING
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A Philosopher's Weight
~ Authored By - CHARIKLIA MARTALAS (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:345-368)
Abstract View Article PDFA Philosopher's Weight is a work of auto-theory emerging from necessity. The writer's bodily crisis exposes an untenable fragility found when her conviction in posthumanist ideas of materialism is discontinuous with the lived reality of her embodiment. However, rather than dismissing theory, philosophy becomes a method of care. Theory helps name problematic self-understandings and their logic and then radicalizes as a catalyst for uncovering the unknown path of a different way of being. The method of the piece is the immediacy of its writing. A dramatic performance of returning and re-returning to the act of thinking anew. The piece recursively unravels inherited familial scripts, self-witnessing through the perceptions of others, the intensity of lived bodily reality and the nonhumanness of a medicated body. In this unravelling, the writer creates a hybrid text in motion. Both philosophical and memoiristic, these modes of writing challenge and drive the piece through the demands they place on each other. However, at every turn the danger in the act of writing is present— the difficulty of leaving behind previous thinking as well continuously having to confront how the unexpected forces re-examination. Each turn and return of the piece deepens the answers and the questions of what it means to inhabit a body. In the process embodiment successively transforms into something stranger. By the end what is clear is that the act of writing one’s embodiment cannot be concluded. It is an ongoing process, messy in its ambiguity, with a body that will never lose its otherness. What the writing proves in its lack of closure is not the failure of philosophy to capture the complexity of embodiment. Instead it is the power of philosophy to rupture the language of our descriptions that are failing us as a means for new language to emerge.
POEM / CREATIVE WRITING
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Entangled Algorithms
~ Authored By - ROB WALKER (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:369-377)
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BOOK REVIEW
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Rethinking Natureculture and Coexistence: Mondal, Kaushani, ed. Staying Together: Natureculture in a Changing World. Lexington Books, 2023.
~ Authored By - SK AMIMON ISLAM (Volume 2, Issue 2, Jul-Dec 2026). (pp:378-383)
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