Searching for the Human: Technology, Democracy, and the Politics of Modernity

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Politics, conventionally understood, is the terrain of the human. However, since the 20th century, rapid changes in technology have disrupted how we understand what is human: from artificial intelligence and the burgeoning transhumanist movement, to the immense scale of information available in the digital age, to the effects human industry has produced on the earth’s geological processes. There are many ways in which politics today seemingly stretches beyond our human capacities.

Given this context, an analysis of the category of “the human” is critical for understanding the political thought and events of the 20th and 21st centuries. The papers on this panel seek to interrogate this concept, particularly as it concerns democratic politics in the contemporary world. Who and what counts as human in contemporary democratic politics? How do new technologies and global political structures shape notions about humanity? And what are the consequences if technology seeks to supersede the human? The papers on this panel consider this question from a variety of angles, from the global to the personal. As we seek to renovate and reimagine our structures of democratic governance, investigating the category of the human is of fundamental importance.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• Return to the Moon: Space Travel and Posthumanism in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Abbie LeBlanc, Harvard University

• The Mediated Self - Mathis Bitton

• Sexual Autonomy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Joan Eleanor O'Bryan, Stanford University

• “A People’s Democracy on a Universal Scale”: Human Rights against Empire - Ewa Nizalowska, Cornell University

Chair

• Shterna Friedman Harvard University

Discussants

• Shterna Friedman Harvard University

• Shal Marriott McGill University