On February 10, 2025, the K-Future Team held a Theory Atelier centered on “The Unencumbered Self: Probability, Space-Time, and the Modern Myth of Freedom,” a lecture by Samantha Frost, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois. Conducted in English and moderated by Professor Dongshin Yi of the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University, the session took up the central concerns of Frost’s book Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (2016).

Frost theorized the human as a “biocultural creature,” formed through the entanglement of biological conditions and cultural environments. In this framework, the “unencumbered self” presupposed by modern conceptions of freedom is recast as a modern myth. Freedom and action were presented as material and social practices that emerge through the body, time, environment, and networks of relation, leading the lecture to reconsider the figure of the human that political theory has long assumed.