Join me in Jersey City for the Brooklyn Institute’s first Jersey class at Word Bookstore!

Donna Haraway argues in her canonical essay, “A Manifesto For Cyborgs,” that to be a cyborg means to live in a world without tidy origin stories or innocent wholeness. Instead, it is about partial connections, complex kinship with humans, non-humans, and machines, and an acceptance of the messiness that it takes to get along better together. Using this formulation of cyborg theory as a jumping off point, this seminar will explore what it means to live in our modern world where myths of human-machine synthesis prefigure our attitudes toward technology and the future, the responsibility of humans toward non-humans and the environment, capitalist accumulation, and oppression based on gender, race, and class.

Over a career spanning four decades, philosopher of science Donna Haraway has revolutionized how social theorists and technoscience practitioners understand the situated objectivity of scientific knowledge, with special attention to the ways in which technoscience assigns biological meaning to social categories of gender. 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 those works that draw on Marxist feminist theory, philosophy of science, and multispecies concerns.