The ongoing process through which humans, technologies, and institutions become interwoven in ways that blur boundaries between organism and machine, producing hybrid subjects, practices, and accountabilities in situated worlds.
Cyborgification builds from Haraway’s cyborg figure as a situated, material-semiotic companion that unsettles divides such as human/machine, nature/culture, and mind/body. In this register, the cyborg is not a sci‑fi creature but a way of noticing how bodies, tools, infrastructures, and discourses co-produce capacities and identities. Cyborgification names the ongoing making of these hybrids in everyday life: keystrokes that rely on autocorrect, registration records that enact studenthood, learning management systems that script pedagogy, or writing tools that model voice. It foregrounds how boundaries are enacted in practice and how those boundaries matter for ethics and politics.
In a new materialist and postqualitative grammar, cyborgification is an onto-epistemological process that distributes agency across humans and nonhumans, renders “the subject” a composition rather than a center, and treats knowledge as a material-discursive accomplishment. It resonates with Barad’s agential realism (apparatuses produce phenomena through agential cuts), Bennett’s vibrant matter (liveliness of things), and Braidotti’s posthuman subject (becoming with technological and environmental forces). Where Deleuze & Guattari speak of assemblages and machinic becomings, cyborgification helps track how these becomings are stabilized or unsettled by specific socio-technical arrangements. It invites attention to dependency, augmentation, vulnerability, and power in hybrid life.
Cyborgification reframes inquiry around relational becomings rather than isolated individuals or discrete tools. For method, this means designing research apparatuses that can register how bodies, devices, interfaces, policies, and histories co-compose phenomena. It encourages tracing attachments and junctions (ports, prompts, templates, rubrics, APIs), following how they modulate perception, affect, authorship, and judgment. Analysis attends to performativity: how practices and artifacts do things in the world. Ethics is situated and relational, concerned with response-ability in entanglement rather than compliance to abstract rules. This approach aligns with postqualitative commitments to composing with data, reading phenomena through one another, and foregrounding material-discursive practices over representational coding.
Cyborgification clarifies how writing instruction becomes a human–AI–infrastructure hybrid. Instructors and students compose with platforms, prompts, autocomplete, citation managers, detectors, and institutional policies. Authorship emerges through these attachments: model completions shape voice; assignment templates canalize genre; feedback interfaces scaffold attention; detectors redistribute trust and suspicion. Lived, embodied experience is likewise hybridized: frustration or relief arises with latency, interface friction, or the uncanny familiarity of generated text; confidence might be tethered to the feeling of co‑writing with an agent that anticipates phrasing.
A cyborgification lens helps analyze shifts in creativity and learning. It makes visible how capacities are extended and constrained by assemblages, where invention may consist in configuring prompts, curating iterations, and attuning to style transfer. It also spotlights governance: how policies, dashboards, and terms of service enact norms of originality and accountability. Pedagogically, cyborgification invites designs that acknowledge distributed agency: reflective trace logs of prompt chains, versioned drafts that show human–model interplay, consentful protocols for disclosure, and rubrics that evaluate configuration, curation, and revision rather than output alone.