Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Committee Director

Margaret Kilcline-Konkol

Committee Member

Delores Phillips

Committee Member

Dylan Wittkower

Abstract

While humanity has, throughout our species’ history, endeavored to dream and create astonishing, and ever-evolving, (bio)technologies with the utopian ideals of bettering our day-to day lives and achieving greater longevity, our endeavors have (thus far) not only produced remarkable, beneficial advances in longevity and quality of life, but have also yielded devastating and dire outcomes; often at the cost and victimization of marginalized communities. This dissertation focuses on select (bio)technologies – particularly, those promoted by H+ (the most current and popular technoutopianist non-profit, “educational,” organization) – with an investigation of current and nascent (bio)technological evolutions, futurist literary texts, and critical/digital humanistic scholarship. By surveying H+’s panglossian, egalitarian rhetoric, I challenge this movement’s intentionality’s, (re)contextualize them, and seek to integrate their ideological aims within an interdisciplinary framework of RL potentialities, in furtherance of increased, ethical, collaborative and rigorous discourse. Additionally, I seek to inspire all participants (from developers to financiers) in the race for (bio)technological advances to prioritize the protection of sustainable, nutritive, and thriving global ecologies. Each Chapter investigates select (bio)technological affordances, queries their horizons, and examines if such technologies are capable of creating an H+ian trans-/posthuman technoutopian world in which both humankind (write large), as well as our global ecologies, will thrive or if such (bio)technologies will instead, further reify and/or exacerbate extant systemic inequities, and yield increased deleterious effects on our global ecologies.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.25777/7sp4-zj13

ISBN

9798180196019

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