Ryan Higgitt

Ph.D. Candidate

 

Research Interests

My interests are varied, but mainly I am concerned with the shift from a modern liberal humanist to a “posthumanist” society, as reflected in an increased blurring of the lines between the human and the nonhuman as the Project of Modernity progresses. Much of my work is informed by postmodern social theory and the sociology of science and technology.

In particular though, I have worked on and continue to work on (or be interested in) the following issues:

1. The quest, as embodied in the discipline of paleoanthropology, to discern the origins of behaviorally modern humans.
2. How the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of the discipline of artificial intelligence to build a thinking machine might inform a shift from the regime of the human to the posthuman.
3. Poverty and efforts to fight poverty, particularly within countries Bauman would call “late comers to modernity”.

Publications

• Higgitt, R. 2011. “Habermas’ Communicative Rationality and Connectionist AI. Culture, Theory & Critique.Vol.52(1):101-118
• Higgitt, R. 2011. “Women’s Leadership as a Poverty Reduction Strategy: Lessons from Bangladesh.” Journal of South Asian Development. Vol.6(1):93-119
• Higgitt, R. 2007. “Le sexe et le comportement suicidaire : Une revue de travail de Sylvia Sara Canetto.” Recherches Sociographiques. Vol.48(3):184-188