SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble
Donna Harraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Monday March 24, 2014
5:15 – 7:00 p.m.
University of Alberta Faculty Club
11435 Saskatchewan Drive
Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2G9
Watch Live Online Here!
After centuries of genocides, environmental destruction and its unevenly distributed suffering, and rampant killing of species, as well as individuals, Haraway suggested that humans turn to SF - string figures, science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism - as mechanisms for envisioning the future.
Haraway's influence is felt widely in cultural studies, contemporary art and media theory, women's studies, political theory, primatology, literature and philosophy. Donna Haraway's prolific publications are required reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences. This lecture will be of interests to faculty and graduate students across the campus, and especially in Art and Design, STS, Women’s and Gender Studies, English and Film Studies, Political Science, Humanities Computing, Human Ecology, and Native Studies.
Sympoesis, not autopoesis, and SF provide the guiding threads for the string figure game of my multispecies muddles. SF is a multi-stranded pattern, including speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, string figures, so far. This talk argues that the sciences of the “modern evolutionary synthesis,” forged roughly between the 1920s and 1950s, with branches in the sociobiology and neo-Darwinsm of the 1970s and following, shape and distort attention to human-induced mass extinctions and rewordings named the Anthropocene. These sciences are rooted in a search for units and relations, especially competitive relations, and have a hard time with three pivotal domains of biology: embryology and development, symbiosis and collaborative entanglements, and the vast worlds of microbes. Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics suggest something very different, namely, attention to “multi-species becoming with.” This kind of alert attending might be more able to sustain us in staying with the trouble of human-induced mass extinctions as well as to foreground the still possible kinds of recuperation and flourishing that terran critters craft together. Tentacular beings can assist bipedal entities in recrafting material practices and imaginations needed for staying with the trouble. The talk explores emerging trans-disciplinary biologies, which might be called EcoEvoDevoHistoTechno, for the string figures tying together human and nonhuman ecologies, evolution, development, history, technology, arts, and affect. Infection and indigestion, not production and reproduction, are the name of this game, as critters render each other capable both of inheriting the terrible trouble of our mortal, corporeal, sensuous Terra and of shaping ongoingness. Marine and crocheted corals are key players in the wordings of this talk.
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale Univeristy in 1972 and has taught the history of science, science and technology studies, and feminist theory at the University of Hawaii, Johns Hopkins University, and, since 1980, the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has been the principle adviser for over 60 doctoral students and served as committee member for many more in North America, Europe, and Australia. In 2000 she was awarded the JD Bernal Prize, the Society for Social Studies of Science’s highest honor, for distinguished life-time contributions to the field. Haraway is in demand as a lecturer internationally, and her work, translated into more than 15 languages, has been widely anthologized. Haraway’s current projects include: (1) a book of very short pieces called Elderberries, focusing on surprising tangles for human and nonhuman critters accompanying each other growing older together; (2) a series of essays titled Staying with the Trouble, which weave together human and nonhuman engagements in multispecies art activisms, histories, ethnographies, technologies, and sciences.
Donna Haraway is one of the few contemporary scholars who can claim to have genuinely influenced the development of multiple fields of disciplinary inquiry through their work. Over the past twenty-five years, Haraway has challenged many epistemic divides that are foundational to the way in which we, in this contemporary moment, have come to understand the world—the binary between nature and culture, the divide between sex and gender, and the messy lines between practice and theory foremost among them. In groundbreaking books such as Primate Visions (1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991),Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™ (1997), Haraway has insisted that we understand the ways in which human subjects and their epistemic systems are shaped by the multiple environments they inhabit (political, economic, technological, literary, cultural, and social situatedness); importantly, she has also pointed to the ways in which categories such as “facts” and “objective knowledge” that remain so crucial to scientific inquiry are produced by semiotic systems that are essential to examine. "We are not simply born into some sort of 'natural' order,” Haraway writes in Simians. “Organisms emerge from a discursive process."
Haraway's influence is felt widely in cultural studies, contemporary art and media theory, women's studies, political theory, primatology, literature and philosophy. Donna Haraway's prolific publications are required reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences. This lecture will be of interest to many.
Supported by:
Dr. Haraway’s Keynote is sponsored by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, the Situating Science Cluster, the Department of Art and Design, and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.
Organized by:
Natalie S. Loveless, Assistant Professor, Art and Design, University of Alberta
External Web Address: http://researchcreation.ca
More:
http://ihr.asu.edu/news-events/news/2013-distinguished-lecturer-donna-haraway-reading-group
