This seminar explores key developments and points of tension between postphenomenology, posthumanism, and new materialism as three influential yet distinct approaches to technology, subjectivity, and relationality. While all three perspectives challenge humanist assumptions about autonomous subjects and neutral technologies, they do so in different ways and with different conceptual priorities. Postphenomenology has developed a strong vocabulary for analyzing technological mediation, multistability, and the concrete ways technologies shape perception, action, and everyday practice. Posthumanism and new materialism, by contrast, have pushed more forcefully against anthropocentrism and representationalism, emphasizing entanglement, intra-action, distributed agency, and processes of becoming that exceed the human subject.

Rather than treating these traditions as interchangeable, the seminar examines what is at stake in their differences. What does postphenomenology ask of posthumanism and new materialism in terms of conceptual precision, empirical applicability, and attention to lived experience? Conversely, what do posthumanism and new materialism ask of postphenomenology in terms of relational ontology, co-constitution, and the critique of residual human-centered assumptions? How do concepts such as mediation, intra-action, subjectivity, materiality, and agency shift when read across these traditions? And where do these perspectives genuinely enrich one another, rather than merely stand side by side?

The seminar also addresses the internal developments within and between these fields, including attempts to build bridges across them in educational research, technology studies, and feminist theory. By focusing on both dialogue and friction, the seminar asks what these approaches can learn from one another, where their differences remain productive, and how those differences matter for contemporary analyses of technology, learning, and human–nonhuman relations.

Program

9:30–9:40
Welcome and framing remarks
Cathrine Hasse

9:40–10:05
Learning in relation to the three perspectives
Cathrine Hasse

Including Q/A

10:05–10:35
Postphenomenology
Robert Rosenberger

Including Q/A

Short break 10.35-10.40

10:40–11:10
New Materialism and Posthumanism
Linnea Bodén

Including Q/A

11:10–11:30
Joint discussion with all speakers commenting on the main issues debated

11.30-12.00

Joint discussion with all speakers and audience

12.00-13.00 Joint lunch