Eco-Digital Posthumanism: Eco-Digital Co-Responsible Agency, Genealogy and Research Agenda

Eco-Digital Posthumanism is a sociological-philosophical theory that redefines subject formation and civic responsibility at the intersection of ecological systems and digital infrastructures. While posthumanist thought has powerfully decentred the human subject, and critical data studies have examined the material conditions of digital architectures, their co-constitution remains undertheorized. This article addresses that gap. It does so through three theoretical moves. Drawing on Barad's intra-action (Barad, 2007), it rejects the presumption that entities precede relations. Haraway's notion of sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016) situates subjectivity within multispecies processes of co-becoming, resisting the reduction of ecology to measurable footprint. Braidotti's relational ethics (Braidotti, 2013) reframes the posthuman subject as embodied, embedded, and fundamentally non-autonomous. Their approaches diverge in emphasis yet converge in destabilizing the fiction of the self-standing individual. From this convergence, the theory derives its central construct: eco-digital co-responsible agency, namely the proposition that if agency is distributed across humans, non-humans, and digital infrastructures, responsibility cannot be individualized but must be shared ecologically and technologically. This onto-epistemological claim, following Barad's inseparability of ethics and ontology (Barad, 2007), grounds the theory's normative implications rather than reducing them to design prescriptions.At the centre of the theory lies an unresolved tension. Ecological re-embedding (grounded in place, embodied attentiveness and material co-presence) confronts the dis-embedding logic of algorithmic platforms, curated self-performance, and data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). The theory does not seek to dissolve this contradiction. It treats it as analytically generative. Its implications extend to education, AI ethics, media studies, and civic ecology, demanding a reconfiguration of institutional and technological arrangements that currently amplify algorithmic mass individualism.