“A Conversation with Donna Haraway: beginning with ‘Avatar’ and continuing from there”

An Event at Revolution Books, 2017 S. King Street, Honolulu

Sunday, January 31, 2010, 3pm

“A Conversation with Donna Haraway:
beginning with ‘Avatar’ and continuing from there”

We are changing our scheduled talk on global warming from this Sunday to the following Sunday (February 7).

This Sunday we have a unique opportunity to sit down and have a discussion with Donna Haraway, one of the most important practitioners in a field that ties together science and technology studies, anthropology, and animal studies. She is a theorist in the relationships between people and other organisms, so the conversation will begin with “Avatar.” The conversation is sure to be thought-provoking and controversial, helping us think of how humans might relate to oher organisms if we lived in a more just and less exploitative world.

Join us at 3pm for an informal conversation with Donna Haraway.

Donna Haraway Biography [Shamelessly copied from a biography prepared for a UC Berkeley talk] In terms of research, writing, and teaching, Donna Haraway is one of the most important practitioners in a field that ties together science and technology studies, anthropology, and animal studies. Having done an undergraduate degree at Colorado College with a major in Zoology and minors in Philosophy and English, she went on to complete her Ph.D. at Yale in Biology (but with an “interdisciplinary arrangement” with the Departments of Biology, Philosophy, and History of Science and Medicine).

She began her teaching career at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, moved to Johns Hopkins, and joined the History of Consciousness Board at UC Santa Cruz in 1980. Once again defying traditionally defined departmental categorization, however, Professor Haraway holds associate memberships in Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, and Film and Digital Media.

Throughout her work, Haraway explores the ties between technical and popular worlds and the thick traffic between natures and cultures. She is committed to supporting practical collaborations and intellectual exchange between working scientists, especially biologists, and scholars in the arts, social sciences, and humanities.

Haraway is a leading theorist of the relationships between people, other organisms, and machines, her work having incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. A cyborg, she explained in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), is a “hybrid of machine and organism.” It is a “fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices.” “The Cyborg Manifesto,” first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate and graduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

In addition to a long list of essays, Professor Haraway is also the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos (North Atlantic Books, 2004, originally Yale University Press, 1976); Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science ( Routledge, 1989); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan  Meets OncoMouse (Routledge, 1997); and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).

Haraway’s current research explores the ties between human beings and other animals in contemporary contexts. When Species Meet examines philosophical, historical, cultural, personal, technoscientific, and biological aspects of animal-human inter- and intra-actions. Dogs lead the way; but strong supporting roles are reserved for dugongs, tigers, mushrooms, chickens, cats, squid, animal people, micro-organisms, and whales with videocams. Forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press, 2007. This work is an example of the recent explosion of cross-disciplinary animal studies, for example, in literature, social geography, art history and practice, film studies, anthropology, environmental studies, philosophy, law, sociology, and science and technology studies.