Synopsis: The conversation with feminist philosopher Donna Haraway marks a groundbreaking exploration of what it means to be human in the age of AI, as she shares her pioneering ideas on resisting authoritarian "mono-thought" and embracing generative thinking. Description: “Thinking requires action and passion,” says feminist philosopher and scholar Donna Haraway. In her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” and 2003’s “The Companion Species Manifesto”, she challenged patriarchal, binary, species-ist frameworks. It’s no surprise that people are looking to her work again now. Find out what it means to be human in an age of AI and how to resist authoritarian “mono-thought.” Guest: Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness Department; Author, A Cyborg Manifesto, When Species Meet, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Full Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. Watch the episode released on YouTube; PBS World Channel Sundays at 11:30am and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio (check here to see if your station airs the show) & available as a podcast January 21st, 2026. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters. Become a member today, go to https://Patreon.com/LauraFlandersandFriends.
Synopsis: A leading voice in feminist philosophy, Donna Haraway joins Laura for an incisive discussion on challenging patriarchal norms and cultivating a more inclusive understanding of humanity, one that prioritizes accountability and empathy in an increasingly complex world.
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Description: “Thinking requires action and passion,” says feminist philosopher and scholar, Donna Haraway in this unique conversation. In her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” and 2003 work, “The Companion Species Manifesto”, Haraway challenged patriarchal, capitalist, binary, species-ist ways of looking at the world. It’s no surprise that people are looking to her work again now. Generative thinking, she tells Laura, requires “taking the risk to try a new pattern; to invent something that may very well fall apart in your collective hands but leaves threads to be picked up again.” In this episode, Haraway and Flanders sit down for an expansive conversation about what it means to be human in an age of AI and resisting what she calls authoritarian “mono-thought.” Plus, a commentary from Laura on staying in the present and “staying with the trouble.”
“An individual is embedded deeply in worlds with other people, with other organisms, with living and non-living parts of the world. To be a self is to come to a thicker appreciation and accountability for the way we're embedded in the world and act in the world. That's what I mean by being a proper self.” - Donna Haraway
Guest: Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness Department; Author, A Cyborg Manifesto, When Species Meet, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Watch the episode released on YouTube; PBS World Channel 11:30am ET Sundays and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio (check here to see if your station airs the show) & available as a podcast January 21st, 2026.
Full Episode Notes are located HERE.
Full Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation.
Music Credit: 'Thrum of Soil' by Bluedot Sessions, 'Steppin' by Podington Bear, and original sound design by Jeannie Hopper
Support Laura Flanders and Friends by becoming a member at https://www.patreon.com/c/lauraflandersandfriends
RESOURCES:
*Recommended book:
“The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness” by Donna Haraway: *Get the book
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Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:
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• Survival Guide for Humans Learned from Marine Mammals with Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Watch / Listen: Episode Cut and Full Uncut Conversation
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Related Articles and Resources:
• Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival by Fabrizo Terranova - Watch
• Making Oddkin: Story Telling for Earthly Survival lecture at Yale - Watch
• You Are Cyborg by Hair Kunzru, February 1, 1997, WIRED
• Donna Haraway, Erasmus laureate 2025 at the Next Nature Museum, November 21, 2025, by Next Nature
• Rethinking Humanity with Donna Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto for the AI Age, August 18, 2025, Philosopheasy
CHAPTERS:
Donna Haraway's Insights on Technology and Species
00:00:00
Why Haraway's Work Resonates: Thinking as a Collective Game
00:02:29
The Most Dangerous Story: Authoritarianism and Racial Capitalism
00:05:27
Beyond Binary: Understanding Technology's Dual Capacity for Good and Harm
00:08:48
From Isolated Individual to Networked Holo-Bion: Redefining the Self
00:11:09
Challenging Fixedness: The Diverse History of Humanity and Collective Life
00:18:40
Staying with the Trouble: Practicing Accountability and Making Kin
00:22:25
Finding Joy in Collective Action and Building Support Structures
00:27:49
The Power of Friendship and Non-Biological Kinship in Life and Work
00:31:50
Learning from Dogs: Agility and the Dance of Being with Others
00:36:58
From Local Action to AI: Revisiting the Cyborg Manifesto for Today's World
00:42:57
Affirmative Feminism and the Transformative Power of Compost
00:48:31
The Future is Now: Making Our Thick Present Livable & Show Outro
00:53:06
0:00
123 While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offered to our members and podcast subscribers the full, uncut conversation.
These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters.
0:24
Our guest today, Donna Harroway, saw our future before we did.
Decades before AI and climate crises were shaping our realities, Harroway, a visionary scholar and provocative feminist philosopher and scientist, was already telling us something very radical, namely, that we were never separate from technology, never separate from other species, never separate from the planet itself, and that our survival depended on understanding those very things.
0:55
Are we self or Cyborg?
How do technologies shape power and resistance?
How do we care for a world in tatters, as ours sometimes seems to be?
Donna Harraway helps us think about all those questions and more, but most crucially, she urges us to think generatively and as often as possible together.
1:16
She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center in the Center for Cultural Studies there.
Her 1985 Cyborg Manifesto and 2003 work, The Companion Species Manifesto, helped blow up lots of old patriarchal, capitalist, binary speciesist ways of looking at the world and offered an expansive, rare transdisciplinary interspecies practice for us.
1:52
Instead.
She is clear eyed about the mess that we have made, but believes we do have the tools we need to face it without despair or denial.
If, as she puts it, we stay with the trouble and do the work of worlding differently, what does all that look like?
2:08
Well, more and more people are turning to Harraway's work today for a road map, and no wonder.
It all seems newly relevant.
But I bet she'll resist the whole idea of handing us a road map, as you'll see.
I'm especially honored and happy to welcome Donna Harroway to Laura Flanders and friends.
2:25
Donna, welcome.
I'm so glad to have you in this conversation.
Well, thanks.
It's really a pleasure to be here.
I don't know whether you know, but you sent us over a video earlier today and the pre roll ad for that video on YouTube was for a robotic dog or puppy God.
2:40
And I thought, well, sometimes those algorithms really do nail it.
Those are two of some of your favorite subjects.
Except robotic dogs are not my favorite kind of dog.
They they seem to be developed like robotic insects as part of war technology.
2:56
Well, this one was very cute, which probably does mean that it's fronting for something very dangerous.
As we begin, I I guess I have to ask by by I mean I begin by asking you whether you're ever surprised by the relevance of work that you've done over so many years, some of it starting so long ago.
3:15
Did you ever think when you were writing the Cyborg Manifesto, the 80s, that that we'd be here where we are today?
Yes and no.
I certainly never expected that my own work would still be read, because I think I wrote it out of my own need to somehow come to terms with the situations that we were living.
3:37
And we, of course, continue to live them in ever more dangerous ways.
But what I, what has both pleased me and astonished me is that the young folks, I get emails from kids in high school who said, you know, Professor Chavez assigned us the Cyborg manifesto and I don't understand it.
3:56
Would you please explain things like that?
I'm really astonished and also really heartened by the fact that young folks are are reading this work because it speaks to the world's that they are trying to figure out.
4:12
Am I right in thinking that you would reject the idea that you have a road map that you can just hand over to us?
Absolutely no Rd. maps.
But I think what I, I think that the, the folks who are responding are responding in part to the passion and in part to the the sense.
4:30
Well, look, I like to to talk about thinking as an act, as a game of string figures, as a game of Cat's Cradle.
And at the very least it it takes 2 hands and it can be played with many partners.
It's not something that can be played with one.
4:45
It requires action and passion, passing on and taking up, dropping threads, inheriting patterns, passing on patterns.
I think of it as a as a thinking technology and it requires thinking with thinking together and inheriting A tremendous amount, but also taking the risk to try a new pattern to invent something that may very well fall apart in your collective hands, but that the threads can be taken up and we can think again.
5:18
So I think if I have any kind of figure for what I'm trying to do is to play Cat's Cradle well.
Well, I have to say, I fear that cats cradle, the cats cradle approaches is not dominant in this moment of hours, to put it kindly.
5:40
Instead, we're getting no end of kind of binary options, top down solutions, magical answers to complicated problems.
And I wonder which of the stories that we're telling ourselves now so loudly, is the one you think is most dangerous today.
6:01
Well, first a slight addendum to that list.
We also get plenty of network thinking, but I think of that as a very different practice from that.
Taking up with each other the threads of our lives, multi species lives, and trying to find what what makes us flourish in living and dying better, which is very different.
6:24
We might well use digital tools and not against networking and network theory and systems theories.
But the kind of thing I'm proposing is not the network thinking that itself proposes itself as an alternative to binary thinking, but is in many ways simply a repetition of it in on on many kinds of layers.
6:46
So you you hadn't, but you had a different.
Question.
Well, my question was really about those sort of solutions we're being solved that seem like the very opposite of the kind of thinking that you're talking about.
I mean solutions like, you know, I don't know, a wall, a boundary, a war.
7:02
This will save us your Yeah not.
To say.
Fascism.
Well, so my question was, what do you think is the most dangerous of the stories we're being told today?
Well, I think the I think the most dangerous of the stories, which is a a complex story cycle, is the story of authoritarianism and the division of the world into friend and enemy, and the production of others as killable as those to be despised.
7:31
The the way authoritarianism works, taking advantage of our capacities for a kind of participatory sadism, for kind of our kind of being enlisted in theatres of revenge and theatres of attack out of our own sense of lack.
7:49
Being enlisted in that way for authoritarian authoritarian systems really on a worldwide basis that are also simultaneously profoundly engaged in the ongoing reinvention in the ongoing practice of racial capitalism.
8:07
That the extraction of value for some so as to shunt it upwards to a few.
That kind of authoritarianism coupled with contemporary finance capital, contemporary climate and biodiversity destruction and contemporary persecution of migrants across the world, really even while more and more migrants are being produced by the very crises caused by these systems of extraction of value, That's that's the greatest danger.
8:39
You know, you've named a lot there, but you've also alluded to the idea that we do have other ways of thinking.
Oh yeah.
And there are some people that are looking to technology to help us with that thinking.
And that seems another situation where we have a kind of half the people I know terrified by technology, meaning artificial intelligence and generative AI, and the other half, like very excited that this is going to be the tech fix we need.
9:08
Well, I'm kind of a both and sort of girl.
I got that feeling.
You might help my friend in in France, Vincent de Spray, who was a really a marvelous thinker, a psychologist, an ethnographer, gave me a way of saying that to work by addition and not subtraction, to work by atonement and discernment and not condemnation.
9:30
So I think from as as early as I first learned about these things, systems, technologies and digital apparatuses struck me as a simply interesting and embedded in our worlds.
For example, I think I first met them in understanding something about the history of ecology and the notions of energy levels and the movement.
9:55
The movement of energy from, you know, A eats B eats C eats D and energy moves up the pyramid to the top predator, so to speak.
Ways of theorizing these kinds of energy cascades in ecological systems, and ways of theorizing the intercommunication of complex parts in ecological systems.
10:18
A lot of that work was done in the Savannah River project area, one of the first nuclear installations in the post war era.
So learning something about the history of ecology as I was studying biology taught me how fundamental post World War 2 system sciences are to the way we think about everything And the the capacity for destruction is huge, but the capacity for a deeper, thicker understanding and and ways of acting is also very vital.
10:59
In the Cyborg Manifesto and also in the Companion Species Manifesto, you urge us to understand our own selves differently.
Can you elaborate on those ideas and how you think they connect to this moment?
Yeah.
First of all, I don't think of a self as a kind of isolated individual, but rather as a kind of a a complex, temporary but enduring network, networked material.
11:29
You know, we're networked materialities with deep histories.
An individual is embedded deeply in worlds with other, with other people, with other organisms, with the with living and non living parts of the world.
That to be a self is to come to a thicker appreciation and accountability for the way we are, the way we're embedded in the world and act in the world.
11:55
That's what I mean by being a a proper self.
And the Cyborg?
Part.
Well, the Cyborg part, let me tell a story, OK, My first teaching job was in Honolulu, OK, in the early 1970s, which was the era of the electronic battlefield in the Vietnam War and Robert McNamara's transformation of the Pacific, the Pacific theatre, into a theatre of electronic war.
12:25
The Vietnam War is really where that happened.
I was teaching in a general science department.
To quote non science majors, the great unwashed of the world, those who wouldn't be real scientists but should, should learn how rational science does away with the illusions of religion and politics.
12:48
Well, Needless to say, from the middle of the Vietnam War, in the electronic battlefield, there's no way I could teach the sciences or the history of science that way.
I came from a biology Graduate School where we were organized against chemical and biological warfare, where we were organized against scientific racism, where we were challenging the dominance of hierarchies in science.
13:12
And so when I first met digital warfare and understood that as a teacher of fashion design majors and tourist industry management majors and all sorts of majors who were not going to be scientists, that my job was to somehow develop with them what I later called situated knowledges.
13:37
Understandings of the world in which we're embedded and to which we are accountable in system sciences and digital systems, particularly in there in the form of war were really prominent.
But also and simultaneously, I just I was never sympathetic toward an anti technology point of view or a solution to the ravages of technology in the hands of in the hands of the warlords, if you will, that the only possible response to all of that is some kind of quote return close quote to nature, as if there was this nature outside human activity to which we could in some barely secularized story of return to Eden, to barely secularized Christian religious notion of return.
14:30
Return.
You know that either return to a state of nature or being blissed out of the complexities of history in in some kind of techno apocalypse.
Another one of those.
Bindings.
Yeah, really.
From the get go I got that.
These are religious doctrines and that what we needed to do was understand that these are tools like pencils, like paper, like a particular kind of cooking apparatus, like what?
14:56
Like weaving technologies, like making clothes.
These are technologies like any other and the and we need to be skillful players in these technological worlds, right?
And at the same time, you've also blown up our own sense of our bodies.
15:15
I mean, I think I've one of the things I've gotten from your work is this sense of we are actually more tech than we realize.
I'm not just talking about tooth implants, although those are always on my mind, but glasses.
I mean, as people talk about neural implants today, that's not what you were thinking about 30 years ago, but you were thinking about other technologies that we've come to think of as kind of.
15:41
Well, yes, for sure.
I mean, my little fancy new hearing aids, for example, they have a kind of sound technology completely unavailable five years ago.
And I'm definitely benefiting from that.
And I want better hearing aid designers.
But that which we apply to our bodies, or stick into our bodies and become integrated with various kinds of digital systems that way was not mainly what I was referring to.
16:09
Rather, ask the question, what's an Organism?
Well, the Organism is theorized from the late 18th century through to the recent past.
Then you could say in a radical sense, organisms are no longer interesting objects of knowledge for anybody.
16:25
But I'll get to that in a minute.
Organisms are systems of reproduction, production, and command control organise.
Organisms are systems of work theorized in industrial European culture as a system of work with a certain kind of energy input, energy output, calorie consumption, apparatuses like a, you know, locomotor system and a digestive system and a neural system and a reproductive system and so on and so on, integrated into this thing we call an Organism, which is fundamentally an industrial capitalist object and in some non trivial way.
17:03
But this isn't merely A metaphor.
It is also a metaphor, but it's the body itself as it can be known in this kind of cultural situation.
Well, similarly these days, and I think since the Bell telephone work in the 1930s and really especially in World War 2 and super after World War Two, we become information systems, right?
17:31
And we are understood that way and operated on that way and we operate on each other that way, including through Zoom, you know.
OK, so it's more than a metaphor.
And then the other piece of it is that this whole notion of thinking about these relatively enclosed things called organisms has been blasted apart by ecological, evolutionary, developmental biology that talks about the inter and intra both inside and, you know, both between and within interrelationality that is constantly becoming and becoming.
18:10
With that there is no finished Organism that goes from fertilized egg to ancient old lady talking too much or beyond.
Rather, we are all holo bions.
We are that kind of a biological entity that involves an integration, partial integration of complex, complex holes interacting with each other forever.
18:37
There's no set Organism here.
So why do we have such a hard time absorbing that and, and thinking about life in that way?
Because it does.
You're not the first.
I mean, at traditional African languages, many of them have that sense of belonging.
18:55
There's that Ubuntu statement.
You know, we are, I am because you are.
The sense of collectivity is something that, as you point out, was, was very clear and popular coming out of the in the second-half of the last century.
19:10
And yet we have come here to a time which feels more authoritarian, more capitalist, more individualist and more lonely then then we would probably have wanted or or have predicted years ago.
19:27
Why is this winning out?
It seems like in this moment when people feel scared, they grasp for fixedness, whether it's gender.
Or group.
And maybe that's just human nature.
No, it's not human nature.
I actually think it's a it's a small chapter in the history of our species and I love this, the book by David Gruber and and David the other David anyway, that the dawn of everything that discusses the long history of our species and the multiple ways that we have organized ourselves.
20:02
Into, you know, agriculture in cities in and foraging and so on and so on that that that there aren't there's no story of the origin of civilization in Mesopotamia leading through the various stages of technology to Elon Musk.
Rather, there's a very interesting diverse history of humanity on this planet and there still is not only.
20:26
I mean, people immediately go and correctly to various kinds of indigenous peoples that have managed to keep their stories alive, that have managed to keep some kind of hold on land, that have managed to continue to make it even after the killing apocalypses of European colonialism and their and their diseases and their technologies and their ongoing systems of colonialism and imperialism and extraction of value.
20:55
There are plenty of peoples in the world who have maintained their understanding of becoming my language, becoming width of of a kind of collaborationist humanity that is built into ways of life and into very living story practices.
21:12
So no question that indigenous peoples are key actors in our current moment.
And this is true around the world.
But also, I mean, I, I have really high stakes in saying, look, even people like you and me, you know, who grow up out of these Euro capitalist theories of the individual and their authoritarianisms.
21:32
After all, fascism of the 30s as well as the fascism of today are profoundly capitalist, are profoundly involved in economic systems of extraction.
True enough.
And as my friend Katie King always says, there's way more going on than you thought of an interesting and positive kind, and way less than there should be.
21:56
So, you know, both of us I think could probably come up with all sorts of examples in our own lives of communities that are vital in that matter and that are really saying no to the contemporary authoritarianism, pretty powerfully really.
You're singing our song, of course.
22:13
Here at Laura Flanders and Friends, we're all about telling some of those quieter stories more loudly and maybe critiquing some of the loud ones.
You in your book, Staying with the Trouble, talk about what that might mean.
22:32
I mean, you talk about something rather than a reactiveness or a responsibility, which which I love.
How are you seeing that in practice and and how are you practicing that kind of responsibility?
Cultivation of the capacity to respond.
22:50
That we don't have a list of ethical rules.
We have a a capacity that needs to be enlarged to respond, to make living and dying better.
So not a checklist of people that you can agree with and disagree with, depending.
On that's neither a checklist of people nor a checklist of of, you know, principles.
23:10
I think of principles as as sort of useful tools, maybe a little like a computer, but not the name of the game.
The name of the game is cultivating that capacity to respond vitally, to be open.
You know, I love that Holly Near Song.
I'm gonna grab the words for a minute.
23:28
The the first verse of Holly Near Song that she sang after the murder of the first gay mayor, mayor of San Francisco at the memorial for his She sang, I am open and I am willing.
To be hopeless would seem so strange.
23:45
It dishonours those who go before us.
So lift me up to the light of change.
I think, you know I have this right by my desk.
First of what am I doing or what are we doing?
I think there are two things in particular that I care most about now in this year, in this period that is full of intensifying danger.
24:10
One of them is education and the situation of universities, and the other is immigration and the situation of migrants, both in my town.
So with other colleagues I've helped organize on campus across the divisions, stand up, a kind of stand up coalition that joined with the lawsuits against the demands of the Trump administration.
24:36
That has been, you know, ordinary political activity, letter writing, lobbying boards of trustees, lobbying chancellors, developing solidarity in your own with the union, getting more people joining the union, getting more people act, you know, taking action in lawsuits, joining in lawsuits, supporting our lawyers, making sure our students aren't lost in the shuffle because they're the first to suffer, telling stories about holding on as well as stories of damage.
25:09
So I've been organizing with my colleagues in stand up.
And the other thing I've been doing is organizing with the local immigrant support networks, training as a legal observer, training as a verifier, watching out for the ICE and Customs and Border Patrol presence in my town, showing up at information tables at at fiestas and fairs to pass out Know your rights cards.
25:37
You know, working with working with each other and with folks in town to protect immigrants as best we can.
It all sounds a little bit like making kin in the way.
It's very much about making kin, and it it absolutely it's about making and strengthening kin that aren't biological kin.
25:58
Overwhelmingly.
I have nothing against babies.
They smell almost as good as puppies, but not quite.
All my kids are haploid, which is good.
I love kids.
They go home with other people.
This is a good thing.
Anyway, I'm I'm being facetious.
26:14
Yes, it's absolutely about making kin and it's about trying to see what's going on in your own community, which is both your own community has different, different layers to it.
There's the neighborhood, the town, the state, so forth.
26:33
My own, but I live in Central California in a very multi ethnic community with very deep histories.
I remember that pretty much the first thing the legislature, legislature or the state of California did when California got statehood in 1851 is pass an appropriation to fund bounty hunters who would kill remaining Native Americans.
26:58
I remember one of the first legislative acts in my part of the world was funding the further extermination of Native Americans in California.
You can't know that and not have it affect how you think about now, right?
So yeah, I, I, I feel like the need to think historically is really strong right now in order to be able to act with each other in more vital ways.
27:27
Clearly it's strong and important because they wouldn't be trying to stop it so much if if it wasn't the teaching of history I'm thinking about.
And as you know, the federal government is threatening to make people who do legal observation and and verification to try.
They're threatening to charge us with obstruction of justice, which is a felony.
27:49
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28:06
Thank you Coming back in a way to your students and to this experience.
One of the things we've been trying to convey or we've been hearing from a lot of our guests on this program is the importance of communicating the, the joy that comes from working with others in resistance movements and creative acts of, of refusal of partnering, as you've said, with, with making strange partnerships, unusual new partnerships that enrich your life.
28:37
And I, I again have a question for you as somebody who works directly with young people or has for many years, it's like.
How?
Come this is hard to communicate.
Why are so many so scared of getting involved?
I think the dangers are real.
28:57
That's that may be the first thing to say.
And they're more real if you come from more vulnerable populations that if you get arrested, there may be no income to to help support your family or if you can't get a job, all of the money that your fam, all of the work that your family did to make it possible for you to go to university.
29:17
I think they're they're.
Some real dangers for sure, depending on who you are.
Risks.
Are not equal A and people are scared of standing out, they're scared of being punished.
They're scared of they're scared of losing something, even if they aren't exactly sure what that is.
29:36
But that said, I have, I have to say I've been teaching more or less non-stop since about 19.
What, 1970?
Really.
Before because I was a teaching assistant at Yale when I was a graduate student.
In fact, I taught Skip Gates in a biology and race class.
29:55
That's where.
I got it from.
Since the late 19, I've been teaching since the late 1960s, and even though I'm technically retired, I still lecture.
And over and so forth.
And overwhelmingly, the folks who come are young and they they feel electric.
30:11
And what I experience and have experience with students overwhelmingly is a kind of hunger for that joy you're talking about a kind of hunger for the energy and that they're not mainly afraid.
They're hungry.
And they do take risks.
30:28
I think the problem is sustaining that ability to take risk through, you know, through a lifetime, finding the support structures that let older people take risks.
Well, let me ask you about your support structures.
And I guess where I was really going with that question but didn't go there was to have us all talk more about what we've gotten from the risks that we've taken.
30:51
And one thing I would ask you is how has your life been changed by kind of freeing yourself from being hemmed in by the binaries?
Perhaps you were brought up with hence, And how have the structures that you've dared to build made your life different and joyful?
31:13
Well, the short answer is friendship.
That networks of friends, past and present, just make a make all the difference in the world.
And they aren't always activist friends, though often you we make friends in the from the kinds of work we actually do, right?
31:31
And that my sense is that showing up and engaging inevitably leads to the pleasures of knowing people you didn't know before, of ideas you didn't know how to think before of, you know, maybe even learning how to dance a little bit, which you never knew how to do.
31:47
My sense is that this is fundamentally about friendship.
So how did it work for you?
Well.
Because you were brought up Catholic if I remember correctly.
Oh, that's right.
And I, I, I remained Catholic for a very long time, much longer than most of my peers, well into my 20s.
32:06
And I left the church because I decided I was against it, not because I had lost my faith.
That came later.
And I, what I understood from that is that when you stop the practice of something, little by little, the rest of it goes.
32:22
But that practice is the key activity of religious faith.
It's not a list of doctrine.
It's, it's the ongoing practice of the Mass of the sacraments of the, the, the social justice groups you were part of.
I was part of Catholics against the Vietnam War organizing, for example, I in the church, I found lots of community, but I laughed for a whole lot of reasons that we don't need to go into, but they they fundamentally came down to, even if it's true, I'm against it.
32:52
And and this relates to the issue of authoritarianism in hierarchy and all that.
But I found, you know, teachers who became progressively became friends.
A philosophy teacher in college named Jane Cavill, A fellow philosophy student in college, Susan Cudiel, with whom my husband and I own land today.
33:17
That kind of building friendship through what you're interested in and the kinds of and that also.
But I was teaching history of science at Johns Hopkins in 1980 and I applied for the job in California in a transdisciplinary PhD program that was specifically not organized around disciplines, but was built for students who don't belong in literature or politics or economics or engineering, but need not even just interdisciplinary but non disciplinary, who need the ability to do deep study and writing about the things they care about.
34:03
Well, this program was established to do that.
I was fired from Johns Hopkins History of Science in January, in the same week that I was hired with tenure here, and for the same reasons which depersonalized a a very painful process and told me that those structures which maximize thoughtful freedom are very precious and very rare and they need our support.
34:34
The economic support, social support, and those structures that maintain disciplinary boundaries are way more common that that.
It's difficult for people within them, especially young people, to move outside the area where they're supposed to be without getting punished.
35:03
We're back to boundaries and binaries in a way, and when you mentioned trans it made me think of how we are in a period of destabilizing what had been thought of as a binary, even in the gender sense.
35:19
Do you have a preferred pronoun?
How do you think about gender in general?
Well, I use she most of I use she most of the time but and they some of the time for a range of reasons.
But look, my first husband was gay.
We married because we didn't know what else to do with the way we felt about each other.
35:36
But then we decided that was really a little bit of a brother sister incest.
Not that incest is OK anyway.
We never lost our friendship because we couldn't figure out who got the camera and who got the sewing machine.
Not to be married anymore, but Jay's lover Roberto and my lover, much later, husband Reston, we joined as a foursome.
35:59
We built a kind and we built a family and we we built what I call Odd Kim.
And also my colleague Susan Harding has a son, Marco, who was adopted at a young age.
He came from Guatemala.
36:15
And my husband, Ruston and I and Susan and Marco have had dinner together at least once a week for 31 years.
Building Odd Kim building a family so and I know other and I and I think of the folks I know in the gay trans world are overwhelmingly the most creative in building kin of any any group in society that I personally know.
36:42
And so I've been lucky to have a lot of to have my life built in patterns of Aatkin as well as a really good bio family.
I'm my I would would wouldn't trade my brother with anybody.
I mean really really good bio family.
36:58
Your family includes not just humans.
Absolutely.
My family includes particularly dogs and hens we have.
We only have three hens right now.
We have Cafe Con Leche and Blackjack and Cacao.
And we only have two dogs now, both former St. dogs.
37:17
One is called Shindechu and the other is called Oz.
Both came off the street.
Shinda Chu from Taipei.
Though she has a bad Mandarin, she's named after a a a word in Ursula Le Guin's novella Paradise is Lost, which is about a multi generational spaceship moving toward this this new world and the new world by the Mandarin speakers from the original generation 4 generations out.
37:49
They call that new world Shinda Chu.
So since this dog came from Taipei in the belly of an airplane and landed in San Francisco, she got named Shinda Chu.
You have written a lot about dogs, especially as you're considering species, but I didn't know that you were an agility expert.
38:08
Also, why?
What is this?
What is the attraction of this relationship with a dog?
Well, most of your audience probably knows what agility is, but just in case you know, think of a field 100 feet on the side and fell it with fill it with jumps and tunnels and five foot high a frames and a few other obstacles and have a judge draw diabolical patterns for the 15 to 20 obstacles that your dog has to navigate in order at speed and accurately.
38:41
You get to walk the the course a little bit, like maybe for about 10 minutes, but your dog's never seen it.
So you have to give good information to your dog about patterns to do that.
You and your dog train for literally thousands of hours, literally thousands, not hundreds over a period of years in order to learn to read each other's bodies.
39:05
I use words too, but but overwhelmingly important information comes from shoulders, hands, legs, hips, feet and that kind of tuning of of my dog.
The dog I played agility with is Cayenne, who is who died in 2013 sadly, but she was 16 years old so she had a great life.
39:28
Anyway, Cayenne and I played well.
She got her championship.
We we, we were good and we and we were good.
She was, she could have been a world class international competitor, but she was stuck with me.
39:45
I lost 15 lbs and I trained for all I was worth and she and I worked together and we got good on a good day.
We had really great scores and we could compete with the good teams, but most of the time we were down quite far on the list.
Well, it was beautiful to, to catch a bit of video of you, of you doing that and to see the kind of relationship between the two.
40:07
And, and as we, you know, continue to talk, I, I feel as if we've traveled all over.
We've gone back to the 60s, we've gone forward to the future, although I want to go back there.
We've talked about animals, about students, about learning, about thinking.
There are there are threads to all of this and I wonder if you want to pick some of them out, like if there is a thread to your thinking and you're the way that you live, what is it?
40:34
And then my next question obviously is, do you have tips for people as they try to thread their own life in a similarly radical way?
Or these stories.
If not tips.
You know, Cayenne and I, there was such joy in that.
I mean, I, I love sports and competitive sports are fun when everybody's having fun.
40:54
And Cayenne loved it and she was really good at it.
There was a tremendous amount of just sheer fun.
And since I was spending so much time doing it, I had to turn it into my research or I would get fired.
So I wrote about it.
I, I look, I talked to Russ and what am I going to do?
41:09
I have to, I'm going to be spending all this time, 2 weekends a week in the, you know, the fairgrounds in Central California, playing this game.
No way I can keep my job and do that.
Well, write about it if that's only partly a joke.
The other, The other.
41:25
I have a word, a term which seems technical at first glance, but it isn't ontological choreography, the theory of the the practice of being on to.
It's a Greek term that the kind of practice are coming together of, of being the way you are.
41:43
The ontology, the, the way of being and the choreography, the, the dance program, the pattern of movement, the print, the pattern of interrelationality.
Ontological choreography, I think is a term that holds together a lot of what I think about and a lot of what I try to do, holding together the threads of ways of being in patterns that you don't.
42:11
The patterns have rules, but you you don't know what's going to happen in advance.
The the purpose of the pattern really is to open up what has not happened yet, to open up something new.
And agility did that.
Playing with a dog does that.
42:28
You learn each other's patterns for sure, and you learn to integrate them, and there are all kinds of disciplines for that.
But what it's for is opening up that kind of joy that comes from something that just wasn't there before, A kind of woe emerges from the good run.
42:49
Something something that you may as well call miraculous, that emerges from that from that dance.
From doing something, doing it and opening yourself up to doing it exactly.
So that can be people.
43:05
Oh, go ahead.
It can be writing, it can be singing, it can be activism, it can be all sorts of things there's no one doing, but you have to be engaged for that kind of joy to emerge.
I think the the poet and essayist June Jordan used to talk about just It's as simple as opening a hand.
43:25
Beginning yeah requires as hard as you've got arthritis.
So your advice to people, I know that I'm using the wrong language for you really, but the story that you would share with someone who is perhaps feeling scared or alone or terrified of tech or terrified of the climate catastrophe they're being told is there is coming our way.
43:58
What's the story that you would like to hear told more?
I think, I think what I would, what I say in circumstances like this, because we're all in situations like this where we need to encourage each other.
44:14
And and it might be with a student, it might be, it could be with anybody is to say, OK, just sit down for a minute and think about something that's going on in the world.
You know about something, you know about that.
You want to say yes, OK, that makes sense.
44:32
I want, I want more of this.
I want to be.
I want to remember that this is also happening and let it take up more space in my consciousness, in my mind.
I want to learn about it.
For example, there's a an area just north of town that has been an area of land that was saved from being a a nuclear power plant area or BA series of high end ranchettes for the wealthy or, or, or it was land that had been stolen from the Chotoni tribes of our region.
45:07
Originally it had been dairy farms and so forth.
Well, in this really interesting coalition of the Amamotsen Tribal Band, of the Bureau of Land Management, of Conservation and biodiversity activists in town, of folks who like to hike, of people who want to raise cattle in pastures in a sustainable way.
45:28
All of these people have come together over a period of several years and have built this wonderful area that's now a National Monument that's full of walking trails.
You can even go with your dog on leash because you don't want them chewing on the wildlife.
45:44
You know, there's it's a really beautiful area of land overlooking the ocean just north of town.
It's a really short trip out where you can go in the afternoon, walk with your dogs or just by yourself, whatever building that, release this beautiful thing for the community that makes me feel good about us.
46:06
Some people have had that feeling attending No Kings rallies.
Yeah, participating in the kind of letter writing or congressional call making drives that you've talked about.
To go back to that question of Cyborg once again, if you were to write a new manifesto or or revise, revisit that manifesto of 85, what would be in it today?
46:33
Well, there's no way that this Cyborg Manifesto today would have to deal with the open AI world that didn't exist then.
It would there would be technological developments that would have to be incorporated.
And I'm, I'm certain that I would need to spend some significant amount of time on the ecological cost of these developments, the energetics of, of the cloud, much less open AI and the, the extraordinary destruction of lithium mining for solar panels, the energy cost of, of running these apparatuses.
47:13
I, I'm sure I would spend a significant amount of time on that.
I would also talk about drone warfare and I would talk about what I think of as monocultures of the mind, the kind of flattening of thinking into that kind of instrumental thinking.
47:31
Remember in in Hanna Arant, who was writing about the Nazis and the banality of evil, talked about skill and competence being turned into functional obedience, a, a function.
You know, you're always being a functionary as opposed to a real professional.
47:51
And we see the Trump administration firing real professionals and replacing them with functionaries who could achieve ends in a kind of of a monoculture of the mind, a kind of flattened mode of thinking.
I, I would definitely talk more about a different kinds of thinking.
48:11
Again, using Hana Arant's injunction.
Think we must.
And that thinking is training the mind to go visiting, to know something that is not yourself.
Well, I think in monocultures of the mind, it's a bit the opposite.
We're trained to repeat ourselves again and again.
48:28
So a Cyborg Manifesto would have to spend more time with that for sure.
Take on the algorithms.
And and then the algorithms and what we are allowed the structuring of our world through the mining of databases and the construction of algorithms that give us this world rather than the world we need.
48:48
So finding the ways to build the world we need and say no to the world that we are given so easily.
Sounds like some brain work, but with others in companionship and with your kin and your dog.
49:04
So we the one element of now that we've perhaps under stressed is patriarchy.
And I put I named you as a feminist.
Do you call yourself a feminist?
And.
What's the feminism that you're most excited about in the world today?
49:23
Well, it remain, I mean, the, the, the fight against patriarchy never ends.
It's like cleaning the toilet.
You have to do it every every couple of days.
So I think of the fight against the against the, against patriarchy and all that goes with it as the ordinary work that these human beings have to do.
49:41
But what really enlivens my feminism is that I simply love women.
I love women and girls.
I think women and girls are kind of amazing, not counting the fascist women and girls, although part of them is probably amazing too.
But no, I I think that feminism is, is an affirmative position in the world that affirms, I don't know, all of the words.
50:03
Words are inadequate.
Female is inadequate.
But it it's all of that and more.
I think feminism is an affirmative.
It's about living and dying well with each other, where women and girls are acknowledged and integrated and powerful.
50:22
It's that that's my feminism.
I did think that we might not be still fighting this at this point.
Wouldn't you think?
No, really?
Wouldn't you think we could at least have a composting toilet and throw all the patriarchs into it?
Oh well.
But you just use that word compost.
50:38
And we're, I have to ask you about that because we've been talking recently on this program about the mandate to be useful and productive and functional and the critique of that that we get from the disabled world.
And you've critiqued it too, with this fascinating use of the word compost.
50:56
So when you say compost, what are you thinking about?
Well, I'm thinking about my actual compost piles, but also what they have taught me so that you can build Gump bad compost piles that are really stinky and that are horrible and you can put them in a place where they're just raided by raccoons who then eat your chickens.
51:13
You can really screw up with compost piles A.
So you have to know something to build a good compost pile.
But B compost piles are a multi species endeavor that turn waste into soil, that turn waste into nutrient, that take the detritus of our world and and rework it, recycle it in a multispecies way to make something enriching.
51:39
In this case, to help my onions grow.
So maybe we could think of ourselves as, I don't know, maybe those mushrooms that you dressed up as not so long ago or as species that are capable of making something of this waste that we have also created.
51:59
It's very Zen, very Donna Harroway kind of idea.
Yeah, and also I learned from my Buddhist friends on the do no harm, that kind of of emptying out and not always being productive, but allowing yourself to be and be open and be empty, all of that.
52:19
And I, you know, the various times I've been called a postmodern or a posthumanist or a post whatever, and I, I get grumpy and I say, no, I'm not post human.
I'm compost that we are all already always we are compost.
52:36
We are a multi species ongoing can we are we are odd kin as ourselves.
So we are compost in a very non trivial way.
And look, you can see that I'm still a Catholic because every time I use a metaphor, I immediately make that metaphor be something material, something bodily.
52:58
A metaphor is never just a metaphor.
It's a worldly presence.
I'll ask you the question that we ask all our guests before we close, and that is about the future.
You've thought about storying, telling stories.
53:15
I love that you use it as a verb.
What's the story you think the future will tell of us now?
I don't know.
Looking forward 2550, a hundred years, what do you think the future will say about?
Us, us.
Well, I hope they're amazed at how stupid we are because they've managed to solve all these problems.
53:34
But I don't.
I actually am quite worried in in all honesty, as I think most feeling, thinking people these days are worried.
I think that biodiversity losses are permanent.
There will be no going back to before, and I think that our near futures are in danger.
53:56
That said, I also don't spend a lot of time.
I'm not very sympathetic to thinking about the future because I think our job is to make the present, which is has has deep time to it.
And the present is not instantaneous, It's thick.
54:15
And I think our job is to make this thick present better.
And that's the best thing we can.
I, I, if futures are to be more livable, the best chance is if we figure out how to make the present livable.
I don't think our best work is that kind of forward thinking.
54:36
I appreciate that, Donna Harrowing, thank you so much for your work and for spending this time with us today.
Well, thank you, Laura, and I really appreciate what you're doing.
I think it's very important.
It gives a sense of possibility.
Thank you.
54:55
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