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1944: Donna Haraway's Birth
Donna Haraway is born 06 August 1944 in Denver, Colorado. She studied biology and philosophy at Colorado College and earned her PhD in biology from Yale in 1972. Her writings cross the fields of biology, philosophy, and history of science and medicine. She designates herself a feminist and loose postmodernist. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing of nonhuman processes, and explores relations between processes, cultural practices, and rethinking sources of ethics. -
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields
Crystals uses the work of pioneering developmental biologists Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss for a discussion about a shift in developmental biology from a vitalism-mechanism framework to organicism. Utilizing Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm change into the analysis, Haraway emphasizes the role of model, analogy, and metaphor in the paradigm and arguing that any truly useful theoretical system in biology must have a central metaphor. -
Manifesto for Cyborgs
Manifesto discusses masculine bias that exists in the scientific community. It is meant as a response to American 1980s conservatism. It is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Haraway searches for future ways towards equality and non-dominant behavior. She creates an analogy using current technologies and information to imagine a world with a collective coalition that had the capabilities to create grand socio-political change. -
Situated Knowledges
Haraway offers a critique of the feminist intervention into masculinized traditions of scientific rhetoric and the concept of objectivity. The essay identifies the metaphor that gives shape to the traditional feminist critique as a polarization. At one end lies those who would assert that science is a rhetorical practice and, as such, all "science is a contestable text and a power field". Haraway argues for an epistemology which synthesizes aspects of these two traditions. -
Primate Visions
Visions focused on the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of primatology. It asserts that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females that preclude other types of conclusions. Female primatologists focus on observations that require more communication and basic survival activities, offering very different perspectives of the origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted. -
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. Simians delineates “off boundary creatures—simians, cyborgs, and women—all of which had a destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives.”
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqglzX_y5wM -
The Companion Species Manifesto
Companion species explores the historical emergence of animals who are not meat or lab animals but who are part of a very particular historical relationship. Haraway insists that there are four major tones underlying the usage of the term “companion species.” First: Darwinian history of evolutionary biology; Second: “species” as an approach to difference; Third: projection and transformation; Fourth: natural and civilized. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59N5xwmw5x0#action=share
