On February 10, 2025, the K-Future Team hosted Professor Samantha Frost (Department of Political Science, University of Illinois) for a Theory Atelier session. A political theorist known for her materialist reinterpretation of Hobbesian philosophy, Professor Frost’s work focuses on how the human body and materiality shape political and social life. Following additional training in biology, she published Biocultural Creatures, a groundbreaking book that explores how human beings are formed through the dynamic interaction between their bodies and the environment. She has led the "Biohumanities" project at the University of Illinois.

Moderated by Professor Dongshin Yi (Department of English Language and Literature, SNU), the event began with an introduction to the central arguments of Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human, followed by an active and engaging discussion. Through this work, Professor Frost reimagines the human being as a bioculturally constituted entity, challenging modern conceptions of human nature.

A key focus of her talk was a critique of the traditional liberal notion of the “unencumbered self.” According to Professor Frost, this concept—presuming a subject detached from time, space, and biological conditions—is no less than a fictional construct of modernity. In contrast, she argues that human beings are continually shaped by processes of interaction, contingency, and material engagement. As illustrated in her presentation, she proposes that freedom should not be seen as the expression of a fixed will or autonomous agency, but as a temporally and materially situated practice within networks of relations. Human freedom and action, in this view, emerge at the intersection of predictability and uncertainty, biological constraint and sociocultural context.

Professor Frost’s theoretical approach offers significant insights for rethinking the human condition beyond Western paradigms, including within the context of Korean Studies.