Donna Haraway and Communication Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making Kin, Making Trouble: Donna Haraway's Critical Ongoingness
The Annals of Science, 2017
The announcement of a recent screening of Fabrizio Terranova's new film Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival at the Tate Modern Gallery (April, 2017) calls Haraway 'one of the most important living thinkers' of our time. Judging by the global influence of the seven books that precede the two under review here, not to mention the hundreds of articles, lectures, interviews, and other publications, this assessment is not an overstatement. Donna Haraway has, for over thirty years, been at the forefront of science and technology studies: frequently controversial, philosophically iconoclastic and relentlessly feminist, her work is also foundational to (even if she might reject the language of) such emergent fields as biopolitics, posthumanism, new materialism, critical animal studies and multispecies studies. Although there is little sign that Haraway, now officially retired from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is slowing down, the almost simultaneous publication of these two books serves as an opportunity both to reflect on the span of her important career and to consider where she is going now: where Manifestly Haraway takes the form of a recollection of, and reflection on, some of her most influential past work, Staying with the Trouble offers a glimpse of the newer paths she is travelling with her formidable analytic and imaginative skills. As the title indicates, Manifestly Haraway brings together the manifestos that marked two particularly important points in the development of Haraway's thinking: the 'Cyborg Manifesto', originally published in Socialist Review in 1985, and the Companion Species Manifesto, published nearly twenty years later in 2003. The former, subtitled 'Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', was (and is) a radically interdisciplinary intervention into feminist debates about power, identity, economics, corporeality and politics, in which the figure of the cyborgpart organism, part machineserves as a pivot for critical thinking about gendered, classed and racialized human/animal/cybernetic bodies and relations in the context of a Reagan-era 'informatics of domination' characterized by fluidly networked, rather than solidly hierarchical, configurations of power and control. Although clearly a product of its time, the work remains a key text in the development of what is now understood as 'biopolitical' thought. 1 (Haraway, never one to turn down the opportunity for a neologism, rejects the term as a 'flaccid premonition of cyborg politics' (p. 7).) The latter, subtitled 'Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness', is, perhaps, less politically sweeping, but still a powerful intervention into biopolitical relations: emerging from her deep and thoughtful relationships with dogs (particularly with one dog, Cayenne Pepper, an Australian Shepherd, and their shared experience of agility training), this second manifesto focuses more tightly on what it means to live and work together with animal and other 'companion species'. Although, as she writes, 1 Although the term 'biopolitics' was initially coined by Michel Foucault to refer to the historically specific 'entry of life into politics' characteristic of western modernity, the larger idea of societal governance through the organization and management of matters of life and living has been taken up in many different ways in political theory, including by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, Achille Mbembe and, of course, Haraway.
Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, 2024
By bringing feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway's A manifesto for cyborgs (1985) and Situated knowledges (1988) in line with contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Colman & Van der Tuin, 2024; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Geerts, 2022), this critical pedagogical and philosophical think piece tackles the problematic of Anthropocenic disruptions of the planetary biosphere for critical pedagogies and higher education (also see Carstens, 2016). It additionally encourages its readers to think through their own pedagogical conceptions and praxes by means of irruptive (Geerts & Carstens, 2024; Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) selfreflection-stimulating questions. Our situated-and thus limited and open-ended-response to this all-encompassing Anthropocenic crisis is rooted in a rethinking of Harawayan cyborgian and situated knowledges and the critical pedagogical lessons drawn from the latter. Rereading Haraway's work through contemporary critical new materialist and related scholarship reveals that it already contained an ecofeminist onto-epistemological shift toward more-than-human agency and relationality. This shift has major consequences for all things critical pedagogical and educational, as our pedagogical thinking-doings are deeply embedded in today's crisis-ridden lifeworld. This rereading exercise furthermore underlines the necessity of an updated critical new materialist pedagogical praxis for learning and teaching, inspired by Harawayan ecofeminism, that takes the entanglements between human, dehumanised, and more-than-human actors seriously.
Conversational Review of Manifestly Haraway (2016)
Discussione di D. J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press 2016, 2016
This review focuses on the often-overlooked theological aspect of Donna Haraway’s work, the formation and clarification of Haraway’s biopolitical position, and its affirmation of the necessity of adopting a narrative that facilitates both Living and Dying well together in the face of potential global environmental catastrophe.
Stacy Alaimo from Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times
Exposure then, is terribly uneven, across such simultaneously social and material categories as class, race, and the disparities between the global North and the global south. And while much of this book has emphasized the material dimensions of the exposure, it is crucial to point out that ideological and discursive categories position bodies differently and have material effects. For feminists, LGBTQ people, people of color, persons with disabilities, and others, thinking through how corporeal processes, desires, orientations, and harms are in accordance with or divergent from social categories, norms, and discourses is a necessary epistemological and political process. For some people this is a matter of survival.The practice of thinking from within and as part of the material world swirls together ontology, epistemology, scientific disclosures, political perspectives, posthuman ethics, and environmental activism. There is no position outside, no straight path, no belief in transparent global systems of knowledge, only modest protests and precarious pleasures, from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.
The Modernistic Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway
2004
Donna Haraway’s (1991) vision of a post-gender cyborg has (re)sparked feminist interest in reclaiming patriarchal technological tools as a source of liberation from gender oppression. These utopian, cyborgian dreams of the dissolution of body and gender dualisms however, are flawed. This failing is founded on Haraway’s underestimation of the gender-influenced relationship between: the historical legacies of the cyborg; linguistic metaphors and symbols; and the lived subjective technological experiences of embodied materiality. Consequently, despite Haraway’s fantastical claims of the cyborg being able to transgress traditional hierarchical bodily-based binaries, this cyborg vision is distinctly modern in a nostalgic, linear, and utopian construction. As a result, these idealistic cyborg visions can be linked paradoxically to patriarchal discourses; the Cartesian philosophies of Christian religion; and the posthuman prophetical desires of the Extropian transhuman collective (Extropy Institute, 2003a, 2003b; More, 2003), such as featured in the works of Hans Moravec (1988) and Kevin Warwick (2002).
The ethics of hybrid subjects. Feminist constructivism according to Donna Haraway
1995
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This article discusses the viability of a feminist constructivist approach of knowledge through the careful reading of the work of the feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes an interpretation of objectivity in terms of "situated knowledges." Both the subject and the object of knowledge are endowed with the status of material-semiotic actors. By blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, Haraways narratives about scientific discourse become populated with hybrid subjects/objects. The author argues that the ethics of these hybrid subjects consists of an uneasy mixture of a Nietzschean and a socialist-Christian ethic. The article concludes by setting out why Haraway s project constitutes an interesting effort to fuse postmodern insights and feminist commitments.
Hypatia
Anthropocene is a multifaceted work. Stephanie Clare is interested in sensations that arise from being a body in the world, particularly in relation to encountering "natural" phenomena. However, far from reading these sensations as unmediated experiences, she is astute in her understanding of embodied experiences as mediated by culture and power. The book works in sophisticated ways with the imbrication of nature, culture, and power and the impact of this on how sensations are rendered meaningful. Straddling philosophy and literary studies, Earthly Encounters is wide-ranging in its engagement with theoretical frameworks and literary works: