Law program, University of Ottawa

Shannon Ramdin is in her final year of the common law program at the University of Ottawa. Her LL.B. is to be conferred this summer. Prior to Law School, she attended the University of Calgary where she received a B.A. (Honours) in English Literature with a focus on cross-cultural relations during the Renaissance as well as a minor in Communications and Culture. She became interested in Human Enhancement while participating in Dr. Ian Kerr’s seminar “Building Better Humans” at the University of Ottawa. If she is not too busy with law school, Shannon spends her time training and competing in triathlons.

In the debates about human enhancement, some believe that its use must be regulated because of its potential to discriminate. O(/o)thers disagree, claiming that the use of enhancement technologies ought to be made available as a basic human right and that a failure to do so raises the possibility of racism.  Both points of view imply that one group – the enhanced or the unenhanced – is subject to a process of “othering”.  This paper extends the post-colonial notion of the Other/other and the process of othering to the enhancement debate, investigating whether transhumanists reiterate or are themselves subjected to a “relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony”.  Are transhumanists others, or the Other?