Thanatopolitics of posthumanism and human-artifice encounters - Sayendri Panchadhyayi

Neo-kinship studies are moving beyond the anthropocene or a human-centred narrative in a bid to accommodate the relations(hips) between human and their more-than-human counterparts, and their relative consequences for understandings of filialities, relationalities and intimacies. With the world experiencing a wave of demographic changes including expected longer life expectancy and increases in the size of an ageing population, innovation in care for older people, drawing on non-human support, are increasingly evident. Examples include Assisted-Animal Therapy (AAT) for depression and loneliness, and Horticulture Therapy (HT) for dementia, both of which have proven to be effective for wellbeing, alleviation of suffering, and fostering an alternative reciprocal world for individuals. Alongside these non- human relationships, there is a growing adoption of complex care technologies for older people, such as humanoid care robots to support the dynamic and intimate needs of the older population.

In this keynote, I will explore how rigid boundaries between the human and the artifice obfuscate such encounters between the human/non-human. For example, attachment to care robots could grow intense, evoking a sense of grief and a void in the aftermath of their dysfunctionality. Set against the backdrop of a gradual shift in care arrangements of older people, this theoretical keynote will navigate the intricacies encompassing more-than-human loss, memorialization and bereavement. Framing arguments through feminist technoscience and posthumanism, it will present the trailing continuities, departures, and occlusions in more- than-human entanglements and losses, and their consequences for the thanatopolitical imagination.