On this episode of Frontiers Augmented, special guest Dr. Donna Haraway’s most recent publication, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, takes center stage in this conversation with Frontiers editor Dr. Kimberly Jew. Their dialogue aims to expand upon the themes of and create context for her writing, which often engages the reader in theoretical, methodological, and literary explorations into not only what it means to live as human beings in a multispecies world, but what it could (or, perhaps should) mean in a not-so-distant future.
For more discussion surrounding this publication, we suggest Aleksandra Derra’s recent book review for Frontiers Journal.
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her Ph.D. in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as a thesis advisor for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Creative Ecologies. Donna trains seriously with dogs in the sport of agility, but mainly lives with her companions, human and more than human, as she struggles to resist and rebuild multispecies public worlds in the current era of racist, misogynist nationalisms and capitalist planetary destruction. Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997); 2nded (2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). A feature-length film made by Fabrizio Terravova, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, was released in 2016. With Adele Clarke, she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing.
We would like to thank Aleksandra Derra for her research on Dr. Haraway's publication and Robert J. Nelson, Associate Librarian at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah for his work as the Frontiers Podcast Engineer.