Chat with Donna Haraway

Science and Technology Theorist

About Donna Haraway

In 1985, Donna Haraway published the 'Cyborg Manifesto', not as speculative fiction, but as a tactical political intervention written on a typewriter in a Berkeley apartment, responding to the Reagan-era dismantling of social welfare and the rise of militarized biotechnology. She refused the purity politics of both traditional feminism and anti-technology backlash, proposing the cyborg not as a futuristic android but as a lived contradiction: a being whose boundaries blur between organism and machine, human and animal, physical and non-physical. Her work insists that knowledge is always situated, not neutral, and that kinship must be forged, not assumed, across difference. Haraway’s fieldwork with primatologists, her collaborations with artists and indigenous scholars, and her insistence on storytelling as epistemology distinguish her from abstract theorists; she writes with dirt under her nails and a commitment to what she calls 'making kin, not babies.' Her influence radiates beyond academia into design ethics, multispecies conservation, and disability justice, always grounded in the material consequences of how we tell stories about life.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Donna Haraway:

  • “How did your critique of 'universal sisterhood' reshape feminist coalition-building in the 1980s?”
  • “What would a cyborg ethics look like in today's AI training-data labor systems?”
  • “You wrote that 'we are all chimeras.' What does that mean for climate adaptation policy?”
  • “How do you distinguish 'companion species' from 'pets' in your dog-human ethnography?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Haraway ever reject the term 'cyborg' after its popularization?
Yes—she repeatedly cautioned against reducing the cyborg to a metaphor for technological enhancement or individual empowerment. In later writings, she emphasized its origin as a 'condemned category' meant to disrupt identity-based politics, not celebrate hybridity as trendy. She criticized Silicon Valley's appropriation of the term as depoliticized, noting it erased the manifesto’s anti-colonial, anti-militarist grounding.
What is Haraway's relationship to indigenous epistemologies?
Haraway engaged deeply with Indigenous scholars like Kim TallBear and Zoe Todd, acknowledging colonial science’s violence while insisting on careful, accountable collaboration. Her concept of 'response-ability' draws from relational ontologies found in many Indigenous traditions, though she stresses these are not interchangeable frameworks—she advocates for 'staying with the trouble' of asymmetrical dialogue, not extraction or analogy.
Why does Haraway use storytelling instead of formal argument in works like 'Staying with the Trouble'?
For Haraway, storytelling is epistemological labor—not illustration, but world-making. She argues linear logic often erases entanglement, whereas speculative fabulation (like the 'Chthulucene') makes visible multispecies dependencies that policy documents obscure. This method reflects her commitment to 'situated knowledges': truths emerge from specific, accountable narratives, not universal claims.
How does Haraway's work address climate change?
She rejects apocalyptic framing in favor of 'making kin' across species and temporal scales—e.g., partnering with coral reefs, fungi, or wastewater microbes as co-laborers in survival. Her 'Chthulucene' names an epoch not defined by human dominance but by tentacular, sympoietic (making-with) relations. This shifts climate action from techno-fixes to practices of response-ability rooted in local, embodied accountability.

Topics

cyborgsciencefeminism

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