Join me virtually from June 12 through July 3 for my latest four-week class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Donna Haraway: Cyborgs, Science, and Gender! For more information and registration, check out the Brooklyn Institute course page.
Course description:
Over the last four decades, biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway has revolutionized how social theorists and scientists understand the situated objectivity of scientific knowledge. She has paid special attention to the ways in which technology and science assign biological meaning to social categories. While Haraway is most famously associated with Cyborg Theory, this course will offer students an opportunity to survey the full scope of her oeuvre, including works that draw on Marxist feminist theory, philosophy of science, and multispecies concerns. Haraway’s work raises many questions about the functioning of scientific discovery and labor in the technology-obsessed post-WWII era. How is the content of scientific knowledge prefigured by the social contexts in which it is produced? How do new arrangements of capital, knowledge, and technology paradoxically make racial and gender categories both more “natural” and more vulnerable to attack? How is nature put to work, and whose interests does this serve? And do new technologies bring with them the promise of utopia, or new nightmares of capitalist speculation and accelerating exploitation of already vulnerable people and species?
Danya Glabau 