Posthuman Folklore

Can a monkey own a selfie? Can androids be citizens?

Increasingly, such difficult questions have moved from the realm of science fiction into the realm of the everyday, with scholars and laypeople alike struggling to find ways to grasp new notions of personhood.

This talk will suggest that folklore is perhaps the ideal discipline for broaching such questions, necessitating a broadening the purview of folklore as a discipline to include nonhuman agents as well. There are two main threads of posthumanism: the first dealing with the increasingly slippery slope between “human” and “animal,” and the second dealing with artificial intelligences and the growing cyborg quality of human culture.

Posthuman folklore deals with both these threads, seeking to understand the cultural roles of this shifting notion of “human” by centering its investigation into the performances of everyday life.