By drawing on multiple examples from healthcare, religion, service encounters and poetry, Lionel Wee presents rich insights into the use of automation in communication through a posthumanist lens.

Lionel Wee is a Provost's Chair Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. He sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, English World-Wide, Sociolinguistic Studies, Multilingual Margins and Studies in World Language Problems.

1. Machines Are Talking ... But Are They Actually Speaking? 2. Laying the Groundwork: Posthumanism, Boundaries, and Assemblages 3. The Death of the Speaker 4. A Hearer-Based Pragmatics 5. Gradations of Anthropomorphism 6. Creativity and Heritage: Two Elephants in the Room 7. Towards Posthumanist Organizations 8. Assemblages and the Emergence of Language from Communication