Any/bodies: Posthumanism and Economics Education (Poster 2)

• In Event: Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Abstract

This paper suggests that non-essentialist, non-humanist views of humanity (post/in/humanities) provide a useful way of seeing economics for the always-already posthumanist, cyborgian project that it is (Haraway, 1990; Mirowski, 2002; Penley et al., 1990). For all its emphasis on (allegedly) “rational” thinking, spirits (Akerlof & Shiller, 2009; Keynes, 1997), machines, and cyborgs are immanent to modern economic discourses. The paper proposes that by attending only to individual human agency and a body possessed and controlled by individuals, social studies and economic educators do not help students understand themselves and others as dividuals. So as problematic as economic education can be, on some level and in some ways, it is describing a reality that many of us live, one in which we are things among other things, where banks and algorithms make decisions that do seem beyond our control. Economic subjectivity is about the body “fragmented into different orders or functions and scattered within any individual sphere and throughout the economic space as a whole” forming disunities, an “infinitely fragmented ‘no self’ conception of the body” (p. 119) and has been all along.

Author

• Erin Adams, Kennesaw State University
  Presenting Author