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School of Geography and the Environment

University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

IGS: Current and Recent Graduate Research

Sebastian Abrahamsson

Invasive science and inventive arts: Towards a cartography of bodily inner spaces.

Supervisor(s):
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Academic Profile

Sebastian Abrahamsson was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1979 where he later studied media and communication and musicology at the University. Four years ago he moved to the south of Sweden where he obtained his master degree in Sociology and Cultural Studies. His theses in Media and Communication studies were mainly focusing on popular culture and music with a focus on otherness and intersectional relations between gender, class and ethnicity. His master thesis in Sociology drew upon materialist philosophies (of media) mainly in Deleuze, Benjamin, Bergson and techniques of perception, embodiment and media technology. Questioning the prevalent methodologies of media studies (reception analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis) the thesis elaborated upon the concepts of affect, bodies, technology, cinema and media as relational components of the cinematographic event.

  • 1998-1999 - Etudes Française pour L'étrangers Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
  • 1999-2002 - Media and Communication studies, Musicology, English Uppsala University
  • 2002-2005 - Sociology, Cultural Studies Lund University

Current Research

The aim of my research is to re-map the image of the (human) body taking into account the emergent philosophies of affect, bodies, posthumanism and science-technology studies. The questions that I am working with are tripartite:

  1. How are the mappings of the human folded into an ecology of matter (and mind), non-humans and bodies, in what can tentatively be called posthumanism? Arguing against the conception of human beings (as indivisible, autonomous and self-regulating entities) found in liberal humanism and the anthropological/anthropocentric machine, the field of posthumanism focuses upon the materialist ecologies and symbioses of humans and non-humans, the living and the inert, the physical and the non-physical. The concept of posthuman/ism is sometimes construed as a definitive, temporal and spatial, break with humanism. I will try to avoid such historicism trying instead to extend on the "posthuman as ontology" by mapping the always already existent connections between (in-/non-/more-than-/post-human) bodies writ large.
  2. In what sense does science and technology (in particular prostheses, neural implants, neurology, medicine, bionics, information technology etc) impact on the situatedness and affective registers of human beings? Conversely, in what way does science and technology change our compositions, our physical and phenomenological selfs, in short: our relations to the world and other bodies? Again, the problem here is clearly one of historicism and anthropocentrism versus technological determinism. The aim is to try and avoid such modernist assumptions while retaining a relational and decentred view of human agency. My hypothesis is that science, bodies and technology work together in a symbiotic and alternating network of brains, bodies, natures and cultures. How can we understand and make sense of this ecology of emergence?
  3. What are the philosophical, ethical and political resources for establishing, thinking and composing a posthuman or more-than-human geography? Focusing on philosophies of change and processuality my research will draw upon a Spinozist and Deleuzian monist ontology of becoming in which bodies are composed through their relation to other bodies, i.e. their capacity for becoming affected.

Publications

Working Papers
  • Abrahamsson, S. and Abrahamsson, C. (2006) What Can a Body Do? - Stelarc and the Body's Potentiality. Presented in Estonia at the Nordic Summer University, Aesthetic Machines 2006 and at Uppsala University research seminar series 2006.
  • Abrahamsson, S. and Abrahamsson, C. (2006) Affective Movements: an essay on Brains, Bodies and Screens.
Unpublished Theses