Posthumanist Learning. What Robots and Cyborgs Teach us About Being Ultra-social

by Cathrine Hasse

In this text Hasse presents a new, inclusive, posthuman learning theory, designed to keep up with the transformations of human learning resulting from new technological experiences, as well as considering the expanding role of cyborg devices and robots in learning. This ground-breaking book draws on research from across psychology, education, and anthropology to present a truly interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between technology, learning and humanity. Posthumanism questions the self-evident status of human beings by exploring how technology is changing what can be categorised as "human". In this book, the author applies a posthumanist lens to traditional learning theory, challenging conventional understanding of what a human learner is, and considering how technological advances are changing how we think about this question. Throughout the book Hasse uses vignettes of her own research and that of other prominent academics to exemplify what technology can tell us about how we learn and how this can be observed in real-life settings. Posthumanist Learning is essential reading for students and researchers of posthumanism and learning theory from a variety of backgrounds, including psychology, education, anthropology, robotics and philosophy.

390 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2019

About the author

Cathrine Hasse has a long expertise in studying the relation between learning and culture in organizations with a special focus on universities and technical laboratories as workplaces. She is trained as an anthropologist and a cultural psychologist and her main study object (material-conceptual cultural learning processes) have through many years of academic work steadily increased her insight in a wide variety of engineering activities and physics at university level as well as schools. In recent years, these insights have been contextualized by knowledge of how culture influence material-conceptual learning processes in physics, AI and robotic engineering in a number of European countries. She is, and has been, coordinator of EU-projects, as well as projects financed by the Danish Research Council. She is also a member of several advisory boards and as well as a present and former member of boards of educational institutions. She has contributed as an evaluator of several university disciplines (including the interdisciplinary structures at Linköping University). Her present academic work is concentrated on how people in Europe are affected by new technologies such as robots, drones and AI. She did her PhD. on "cultural learning processes" in a physics institute where she followed a group of young male and female physicists' students in their first years of study. This project developed into a longitudinal study. She has followed the same group of students for more than 6 years. In her next project The Cultural Dimensions of Science she compared university institutions in Denmark and Italy and after this project she became the co-coordinator of an EU project, financed by EU 6th framework programme, UPGEM (Understanding Puzzles in the Gendered European Map) and is now the coordinator of the REELER (Responsible and Ethical Learning in Robotics) project (reeler.eu). In her research work she takes a special interest in the relations between culture, learning, concept-making, new materialism, posthumanism, gender and education. She is presently the coordinator of a project on the relation between workplace learning and technological literacy funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council. She is the author of several books on cultural learning processes, education, robotics and AI and methodology, and has an international as well as Danish bulk of peer-reviewed journal articles in her portfolio, just as she is an active conference speaker on a number of conferences including conferences with broad interests in the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS) postphenomenology, cultural psychology, learning theory, as well as the future of universities.