Haraway's Concept Research Articles

Barbie Land as cyberfeminist utopia

I explore Barbie (2023) through the lens of cyberfeminism to argue that Barbie Land can be conceptualised as a cyberfeminist utopia. I draw specifically on Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg, and Sadie Plant's literature, to examine how Stereotypical Barbie herself is produced as a cyborg in the film and how Barbie Land draws parallels to utopian fantasies of cyberspace. Themes of glitching, boundary blurring and transgression are central to this discussion, and I apply these concepts to key moments in the film such as Stereotypical Barbie's existential crisis, her travels between the Real World and Barbie Land and the final scene with Barbie visiting her gynaecologist. By placing the film in conversation with cyberfeminist thinking, I demonstrate how Barbie sits within a tradition of texts that place transgression and subversion at the core of feminist politics.

Touch: Romanticised micro-moments from a farm kindergarten

Focusing on two micro-moments between non-human animals and young human children in a Norwegian farm kindergarten, this article contributes to knowledge about pedagogical work with multi-species meetings. The micro-moments from a field study are discussed through an exploration and troubling of what we call our ‘romantic’ experience of the children's meetings with farm animals and our resistance to those feelings. We explore what we perceive as a mutual trust, curiosity and interest between the young children and the animals that we relate to Despret's concepts being polite and getting to know, and Haraway's concept companion species. Our discussion contributes an alternative perspective to the traditional view of children-animal relations.

Who's in control? Situating expertise, (mis)trust, and power among the Latine/Hispanic community in COVID-19's liminal moments

BackgroundResearch has established the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of color (BIPOC) communities, and the barriers to vaccine trust and access among these populations. Focusing on perceptions of safety, access, and trustworthiness, studies often attach barriers to community-members, and discuss vaccines as if developed from an objective perspective, or “view from nowhere” (Haraway). ObjectiveWe sought to follow Haraway's concept of “situated knowledges,” whereby no one truth exists, and information is understood within its context, to understand the exertions of expertise surrounding vaccines. We focused on perceptions of power among a BIPOC community during a relatively unexamined moment, wherein the status of the pandemic and steps to prevent it were particularly uncertain. MethodsWe report the findings of ten focus groups conducted among members of Rhode Island's Latine/Hispanic communities between December 2021 and May 2022. We called this time COVID-19's liminal moment because vaccines were distributed, mandates were lifted, vaccine efficacy was doubted, and new strains spread. We translated, transcribed, and analyzed focus groups using thematic analysis. ResultsCommunity-member (n = 65) perceptions of control aligned with three key themes: (1) no power is capable of controlling COVID-19, (2) we are the objects of scientific and political powers, and (3) we, as individuals and communities, can control COVID-19 through our decisions and actions. ConclusionsBy centering the perspectives of a minoritized community, we situated the scientific knowledge produced about COVID-19 within the realities of imperfect interventions, uncontrollable situations, and medical power-exertions. We argue that medical knowledge should not be assumed implicitly trustworthy, or even capable, but instead seen as one of many products of human labor within human systems. Trust and trustworthiness must be mutually negotiated between experts, contexts, and communities through communication, empowerment, and justice.

Octavia Butler's Bloodchild and the Posthuman Complexities: A Process of Becoming

This paper examines the human-nonhuman relationship for co-reproduction and co-existence between two species in Octavia Butler's speculative fiction "Bloodchild". The humans called the Terrans and the aliens called the Tlics make a contract for reciprocity to save the futurity of both. This research analyzes Butler's speculation of some posthuman complexities related to identity, gender, reproduction and forceful bonding in the far future. The multifaceted female protagonist T'Gatoi, the male human surrogacy, non-normative pregnancy and experimental birth foreground the horror of dystopian future that Butler attempts to make humans aware of. Based primarily on the textual evidence, the paper uses Donna Haraway's concept of "speculative feminism", Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming" and Rosi Braidotti's theory of critical posthumanities to argue for the author's warning to humanity against futuristic crises and call for a critical thought exercise to retrospect on human tyranny, egotism and sense of otherness. It proposes that overcoming the anthropocentric rule over nature and the "others" for the sake of natural equilibrium and socio-cultural harmony can help instill collective consciousness and promote community building to save this planet and the others for a sustainable future.

사이보그적 존재들을 통해 본 포스트휴먼의 몸 짓기

Mapping Posthuman body through Cyborg beings is a research project that examines the meaning of the posthuman through monster- like figures and cyborg beings, often used as symbolic representations of a cyborg in Korean performance art. The project manifests a critical view of transhumanism, which adheres to the same dichotomous division emphasized by humanism, and examines the posthuman being as “materially embodied, embedded in the environment, and intertwined with the world” as well as the ‘worlding-with’ method as a mode of posthuman existence. In particular, she turns to Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg as the theoretical framework to explore how cyborg politics, which transcends the traditional, dichotomous thinking of the West and breaks down its boundaries, has developed within the trajectory of Korean art history. Research focuses on the bodies that get reconstructed at every moment within relationships by the act of blurring boundaries and suggests that we contemplate the meaning of our interactions with others and the sense of solidarity within the context of post- humanism in the post-COVID-19 era.

Listening to Anohni's variously vibrating voice: studying transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture through the concept of vocal figurations

AbstractThis article examines the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni to investigate sonic and discursive negotiations of transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture. Developing Haraway's concept of feminist figurations, it introduces the concept of vocal figurations, which articulates a performative, relational and multiply mediated understanding of voice, wherein gendered voice takes shape through processes of voicing and listening. I initially examine Anohni's reception to analyse how biologist, trans-exclusionary and othering discourses surrounding voice and gender inform emergent discourses of transfeminine voices in the first decades of the 21st century. Subsequently, I build on trans and queer theorisations of voice and listening to engage Anohni's variably vibrating voice as a vocal figuration that may challenge biologist and marginalising constructions of transfeminine vocality. I suggest that it may attune us to recognise all gendered voices as thoroughly situated yet changeable configurations of sounding voices, bodies, and subjects.

Nomadic Subjects: Sexual Difference in Ancient and Ethnographic Studies of Pastoral Mobility

This essay explores Braidotti's nomadic subject as the starting point for a posthumanist perspective for the interpretation of ethnographic and ancient pastoral societies. Why has women's labour and positionality in such societies tended to be ignored by archaeology? The author's autobiographical discussion of her earlier work on village and transhumant pastoralists in Greece frames her personal discovery of gender and power dynamics in mobile societies. The main case study, however, examines the household archaeology of Iron Age Saka (eastern variants of Scythians) and later pastoral groups in order to put forth hypotheses about gendered production in semi-sedentary societies. Haraway's concept of the cyborg and Braidotti's concept of the nomadic subject are examined. Material studies of ceramic serving dishes, household debris and house form at an Iron Age agropastoral settlement apply some of the concepts of new feminisms. A comparison is drawn between the philosophy of nomadology and the anthropological archaeology of pastoral nomads.

Posthumane Selbstformungen in der Gegenwartsliteratur am Beispiel von Olga Flors <i>Ich in Gelb</i>

This article examines the intersections between technologies of the self, posthumanism, and gender by means of a literary analysis of Olga Flor's 2015 novel Ich in Gelb. A reading of the novel shows how Flor discusses the immunotherapy practice of helminthic therapy in connection with different 'monsters' like Medusa, bearded women, and mermaids, motifs that carry certain gender representations. However, the novel not only plays on old representations but also deconstructs traditional gender divisions and dissolves the illusion of a fixed self in employing posthumanist ideas. Applying Haraway's concept of sympoiesis in the analysis of the relationship between human and worm as well as between text and worm, the examination of Flor's novel shows that there is a correspondence between the 'forming' of the self and the literary form of the novel. Therefore, literature has an epistemological function in understanding posthuman technologies of the self.

Cruise trouble. A practice-based approach to studying Arctic cruise tourism

Cruise arrivals in the Arctic often take place in small coastal communities. Although there may be economic benefits for these communities, these are often counterbalanced by social and environmental stresses. In this article, we ask how we can tend to Arctic cruise tourism development using Haraway's concept of staying with the trouble. As a way to bridge often polarized views on cruise tourism as either an economic tool or a destructive force, we propose a practice-based research approach to engage with the complexities of cruise tourism. The aim is to foster response-abililty for Arctic cruise communities to live (better) with cruise tourism. We argue that practice-based approaches help researchers ‘stay with the trouble’ as it is rooted in everyday experiences and the materiality of cruise destinations. Also, its flat ontology supports a ‘tinkering’ approach to cruise practices.

72 Years of Homemaking in Waiting Zones: Lebanon's "Permanently Temporary" Palestinian Refugee Camps.

The “permanently temporary” Palestinian refugee community, present in Lebanon since 1948 with no solution in sight, has the highest rate of abject poverty within all five areas of operation of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East (UNRWA), and it still occupies the same limited geographic space it did 72 years ago. This harsh reality stems from the refugees' statelessness but is also worsened by the local conditions imposed by the Lebanese legislation and (non)settlement policy aimed at preventing refugees from becoming permanent. Within this situation, we look at practices of agency enacted by camp dwellers to provide lacking life necessities and improve living conditions in the camps. This paper will identify and analyze coping mechanisms and homemaking practices undertaken by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, operating within the framework set by Brun and Fábos (2015), which conceptualized home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement through identifying a refugee's “home, Home and HOME.” Building on Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledge, this paper uses data collected from participant observations, interviews, ethnographic and autoethnographic recordings analyzed through the lens of my own positioned rationality as a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon. Further, the paper will explore how Palestinian refugees establish camp spaces as a “home-Home-HOME,” despite their uncertain futures, through vertical expansion of buildings, stories and family bonding, in addition to trading and micro-markets. The paper will also deduce how refugees' informal coping mechanisms offer a way of strengthening community bonds, making home in those, otherwise, uncomfortable “waiting zones,” and finally, envisioning new ideas for restructuring the camp beyond the rule of formal institutions.

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels : Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives

Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives

Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies

Extending the works of scholars who have elucidated writing as the quintessential site for social transformation, the aim of this article is to locate the myriad possibilities for actualizing Donna Haraway's concept of cyborg writing in the field of organization studies. I contend that cyborg writing functions as a discursive mechanism by which to disrupt Enlightenment ideals of Cartesian duality, objectivity and rationality. These ideals inform the very structure of masculine privilege that emerge from having a society that is organized along androcentric values. Situating the scholarship of Jo Brewis, a contemporary scholar in the field, I illuminate how cyborg writing can be practised effectively, whereby greater richness is imparted into conceptualizations of, and theorizing on, organizational and management phenomena. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of cyborg writing, and with the identification of two trajectories that scholars can pursue in future studies. Progress along these two paths will move towards actualizing the feminist project for gender egalitarianism.

Not all dogs go to heaven, some go to Battersea: sharing suffering and the ‘Brown Dog affair’

This paper concerns the memorialisation of a dog's (after)life. It traces the story of the ‘Brown Dog’: a terrier allegedly vivisected in 1903 by English physiologist Sir William Bayliss and subsequently commemorated by two statues in Battersea, London. Each statue has been the locus for ethical encounters between human and animal, and I draw upon the work of Donna Haraway to explore them. The first, installed in 1906 in Battersea borough, enjoyed a prominent social existence at the centre of Edwardian anti-vivisectionism. The second, by contrast, erected seven decades later in 1985, was welcomed with minimal fanfare and now sits, an obscure curiosity, in a corner of Battersea Park. Both statues attempt to honour the non-human lives lost through the unequal and instrumental power relations of animal testing. Here, I see the statues as experimental means of ‘paying attention to’ the suffering inflicted through animal experimentation and vivisection, mobilising Haraway's concept of ‘shared suffering’. I also argue that their varied success demonstrates how both the nature of and responses to the animal suffering they embody are historically contingent. The paper follows recent trends in animal geography arguing that explorations of ‘discomforting encounters’ might offer better ways of relating with animals.

Hefting onto Place: Intersecting Lives of Humans and Sheep on Scottish Hills Landscape

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the phenomenon called hefting of sheep onto the landscape of hill sheep farms in the Scottish Borders. It is based upon data collected during extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork beginning in 1981 and continuing to the present. Hefting is the term used by sheep farmers for the natural tendency of hill sheep to graze, remain, and bond onto specific areas of the landscape without the need for fencing. The herding practices of hill sheep farms appropriate hefting in flock management and breeding. The analysis of hefting makes two contributions to understanding human–animal relations. First, because the of the centrality of territorial bonding, hefting makes explicit that we should always be ready to include a third dimension—place and emplacement—in understanding human–animal relations. Second, drawing on Haraway's concept of “becoming with,” hefting and herding demonstrate the fundamentally relational character of human–animal–place relations.

(Hot) Dogs: Of fast food and companion species

The encounter between dog and (potential) owner is the catalyst for Natan's interrogation of the human/animal binary. Drawing on Haraway's concept of 'companion species', the article explores the film's critique of a double commodification of animals: as pets, and in agribusiness, via Viggo's kebab-shop chain and consumption of meat.

Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species

Abstract Human nature is an interspecies relationship. In this essay, Haraway's concept of companion species takes us beyond familiar companions to the rich ecological diversity without which humans cannot survive. Following fungi, we forage in the last ten thousand years of human disturbance history with feminist multispecies company. Cereals domesticate humans. Plantations give us the subspecies we call race. The home cordons off inter- and intra-species love. But mushroom collecting brings us somewhere else—to the unruly edges and seams of imperial space, where we cannot ignore the interspecies interdependencies that give us life on earth. There are big stories to tell here, and they should not be left to the human triumphalists who control the field. This essay opens a door to multispecies landscapes as protagonists for histories of the world.

Troubling Companions: Companion Species and the Politics of Inter-relations

This article examines Donna Haraway's concept of companion species by asking the question: Are technologies a species or not? This question is analysed through a comparison between the companion species of Haraway's in her agility dog and the technology of the surfboard and its rider. It is argued that the concept of companion species has difficulty distinguishing between technologies or machines as companion species and the bodies of sporting dogs or pets and that this poses questions about the meaning of “living” in machines and animals. This is examined through qualitative research into the technologies and practices associated with learning to surf. It is suggested that Haraway's use of the concept of “becoming-with” in relation to her conception of companion species leads to an empiricism in which relations and connections can be endlessly pursued and that this leads to a politics which is primarily capable of criticizing the naturalization of social relations. I present an analysis of animate versus inanimate based on Haraway's concept of companion species to explore one way in which it seems that it is possible to provide a concept that values different sets of entanglements across different instances of becoming-with.

From Ethical Principles to Response-Able Practice

Chapter 3 of When Species Meet opens with a fictional encounter between a laboratory animal caretaker and the guinea pigs he works with. The laboratory is used to research sleeping sickness in cattle. As part of the experimental process, guinea pigs are shaved and placed in tight little baskets, wire cages filled with biting flies are placed over them, and their skins are painted with poisons to see if these sicken the flies. During a discussion with an observer (a young girl), the animal caretaker puts his arm into the cage. His arm is immediately covered by flies and starts to swell up. The man explains he does this to learn what the guinea pigs are suffering (page 69). For Donna Haraway, this moment captures a very different sense of what is meant by ethical practice, what she terms sharing suffering. Rather than looking towards higher guiding principles and rights to justify the pain and suffering felt by animal subjects during the experimental process, the ethical response she urges is about entangled subjectivities ` opening to shared pain and mortality and learning what that living and thinking teaches'' (page 83). Haraway's move here resonates with other moments where geographers, among others, have produced cartographies for a relational ethics. Firstly, it shifts the focus of ethics away from a singular Cartesian ethical subject, an autonomous individual capable of making rational ethical choices. For Haraway, abstract discussions of ethical principles are limited by working with human or animal individuals, ``the wrong units'' (page 70). In contrast, Haraway's concept of sharing suffering begins not with the expressed wishes of an individual, but with a relationship between the animal caretaker and his guinea pigs which seeks to share suffering. Sharing suffering is a collective not an individual achievement. As Jane Bennett might put it, this is a kind of agency which is ` distributed across multiple, overlapping bodies, disseminated in degreesorather than the capacity of a unitary subject of consciousness'' (2007, page 134). Similarly, the geographer Sarah Whatmore (1997) suggests that any ethical issue cannot be confined to one person, place, or procedure (like an informed consent), but needs to be `situated' in relation to a whole series of locations and agents. But in WSM Haraway also moves beyond a call for a more situated appreciation of ethical decision making. In her chapter on sharing suffering, ethics seems to take on more performative dimensions. The scientist in her opening vignette does not just think about the practices entangling his subjectivity with others, he performs them through sticking his hand in the cage and through the everyday practices of caring for and working with the guinea pigs. Here WSM is perhaps closer to some of the arguments made by nonrepresentational theory and its imperative to be attentive to processes exceeding the moment of (ethical) representation.Within geography, Derek McCormack's (2003) empirical account of a Dance Movement Therapy classoa therapy principled on a relationship between emotion and motionoalso describes a performative ethics. Here, rather than focusing on representing different ethical interests through a procedure (such as the signing of a consent form) ethics is articulated through touch, gesturing hands, and bodily movement. McCormack's account fleshes out what Haraway's ethic of sharing suffering might entail as an Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 43 ^ 45

Domesticating technological myth: gender, exhibition spaces and the clean air movement in the UK

This paper explores the relation between technologies and the reconfiguration of gender relations in the British home. Drawing on Haraway's concept of technological myth, and Barthes' reflections on the modern myth-making process, analysis considers how the promotion and animation of new smokeless technologies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain was under-girded by a reconstituted vision of the British home and the woman's place within it. In part, smokeless technologies promised the liberation of housewives from the ‘drudgery’ of domestic labour. The myths associated with smokeless technologies were, however, also suggestive of a more open sense of the home, within which female citizens could combine a concern with the domestic needs of the family with the broader moral reform of the city as a whole. Through an analysis of various smoke abatement exhibitions, which were convened throughout the UK during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper explores how smokeless technologies were braided into a new mythical geography of the British home. While at one level, this new home promised a scientifically liberated domestic sphere and a more publicly engaged female citizenry, it ultimately served to restructure and reassert the British woman's role within the modern household. Analysis focuses specifically upon the exhibit materials and popular press accounts associated with key smoke abatement exhibitions in the UK.