We carried over this precious chalice full of nonsense from its incredulous discoverer, Steven Hayward of PowerLine, with respectful awe.

These are the words of Sidonie A. Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, author of a book titled Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times.

Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms”, bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.