The work of Donna Haraway feels startlingly relevant in these in-between times. She weaves disciplines into living ideas that dissolve binaries and invite richer and different forms of sense-making that do not offer clear answers, but invite better questions.
Welcome to our very first post in our brand new blog! Woo hoo!
Where better to begin this new phase of The House of Narratology than with an introduction to Donna J. Haraway—one of the most wonderful, important, and relevant thinkers of our time. She has been a personal source of inspiration for over forty years and is a big influence on our House.
Haraway (it feels funny writing her name like that) is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an eclectic multi-species feminist, technologist, zoologist and biologist. Her work offers us insights into the ethics and possibilities of AI, our relationship with technology more broadly, sustainability and climate strategy, identity, negotiating post-truth worlds and so much more.
When you read Haraway you will feel how much her work doesn’t so much transcend boundaries—disciplinary, conceptual, and linguistic—as make them liquid, permeable, and transform them into something else entirely. She weaves feminist theory, science and technology studies, biology, philosophy, literature, and science fiction into intricate intellectual generative tapestries.
Her writing is needfully dense, and it often makes me laugh to myself. I love her abject refusal to strip complexity from life. It might make her work challenging, but it also opens much needed conceptual and imaginative space for rethinking not only how humans, nonhumans, and technologies co-create the worlds we inhabit, but also for how we can open new discursive spaces for these troubled times—something dear to our hearts.
Cyborg Manifesto
She first captivated me with A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, which I read in the late ‘80s. Her refusal of the human/machine binary—and the very idea of ‘disappearing’ by morphing, merging, and melding through and with technology—sparked all sorts of thoughts in my mind.
It remained an interesting thought experiment until the ‘90s arrived. Then her manifesto popped back into my head and became something of a field guide, guiding my imaginations on how this nascent technology might impact our identities and ways of being. She was a source of inspiration that led me to do Europe’s first live music webcast in 1994 (well that, Doom, a friend working at a cybercafe and a piece of conferencing software called CU-SeeMe). It was from reading deeper that my nascent non-essentialist me really formed. Her notion of relationality helped free me from the fixing gaze of others, something I still find myself having to resist almost on a daily basis in my professional interactions
The worlds she created have now become reality as we struggle to figure out our relationship with AI, how meaning is made, how we think with AI, create with AI, how we discern the difference between AI and human generated content, whether there is a difference or whether and how or if that difference matters.
We are living in the same “stressed systems” of the “integrated circuit” in which all “writers” (shorthand for all creators of meaning: text writers, coders to creatives) start to lose track of what is ‘theirs’ and what was co-created with technology. When I myself refer to “writing” new realities into being, it is this generative act that I am referencing.
I continued to dip in and out of Haraway’s work over the decades, always seduced by her brilliant thought and word play. Some years later, when I read the introduction to Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene from 2016, it rang so true that I was moved to tears.
“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
Finally, someone nailed it so perfectly and poetically. I had spent decades trying to help folk avoid the binary traps in thinking, strategies and stories, and hearing her words made me feel I was not alone.
Why do we insist on reducing, flattening and abstracting our gloriously messy lives so? Why are North Atlantic lullabies so binary? What affords utopian and dystopian voices their grip and how do we loosen that? How do we rewild our worlds?
Reading that introduction gave me hope. And it still does now as I see Haraway’s concepts bearing fruit in the mainstream.
Echoes of Haraway
I have long heard echoes of her thoughts in the empathic ‘complexity poetics’ of Nora Bateson and her thoughts around warm data. I hear them in the work of Ellie Snowden and the Cynefin folks’ references to New Materialism which have evolved over the past few years. I hear echoes of Haraway in Bayo Akomolafe’s inherently effusive relational post-humanism, his wordplay that refuses the binary, his references to worlding, and I hear echoes of Haraway in the work of Dr. Renée Lertzman, to whom I offer thanks for the opportunity she afforded me to step up my narrative game.
Most recently, as I edit this post, I see that Owen Matson Ph.D on AI as Technical Cognition a very Harawayan thought I will build on shortly, and now as I go to publish (lol) I see Raymond Uzwyshyn Ph.D. has shared a post on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Vision: A Framework for Understanding AI Literacy in 2025.
It can be hard to start to get a grip of her concepts. So in the spirit of post-humanism, and by way of on-ramping you into her worlds, here is a lightly edited and prompted thread of a few of her concepts as woven by your local friendly LLM.
Knowing the Cyborg
‘They’ is a hybrid figure, part human and part machine, refusing the neat divisions that have long policed our identities. The cyborg doesn’t fit cleanly into any category; it blurs them, mixes them, plays in the in-between. It is both a metaphor and a method for thinking beyond the rigid structures of Western thought—a way to live inside complexity with technology as kin rather than shrink it to fit a binary frame.
Denying the God Trick
From this a-categorical vantage point, the first illusion to dismantle is what Haraway calls the God Trick—the fantasy of a pure, all-seeing objectivity, as if from nowhere. Against this, she proposes the idea of situated knowledges: an ethic of owning our vantage point, recognising that every perspective is shaped by a particular body, history, and culture. Truth is not lessened by its location; it becomes richer when many such locations are brought into conversation.
Rejecting antagonistic dualisms
Much of what limits today’s discourse are antagonistic dualisms—the familiar binaries of male/female, nature/culture, human/machine. These oppositions not only simplify difference but cast it as conflict, locking us into self-perpetuating stories of winners and losers. Breaking them does not erase difference; it dissolves the false walls that keep difference from becoming relationship.
Decentring the individual
Once those walls fall, the figure at the centre—the isolated, autonomous self—also begins to loosen its hold. Haraway’s work decentres the individual, our drive to anthropocentricity, revealing us instead as knots in a dense weave of relationships, ecologies, and shared agencies. The “I” is never solitary; it is always an expression of a much larger “we.”
Embracing relationality
To the heart of the matter: the recognition that beings and systems are not fixed things but processes, constantly made and remade through their interactions. In the language of process philosophy and ecological psychology, we are verbs, not nouns; to change one relationship is to shift the whole pattern.
Worlding
Embracing relationality opens the door to worlding—the act of consciously making the world in every gesture, story, and decision. We are not simply dwelling in a pre-set reality; we are continually shaping it, often without realising it. Every story, every discourse, every narrative, is a small act of world-building. We write reality into being.
Staying with the Trouble
To live in this way, in a reality of perpetual becoming, is to stay with the trouble: to resist leaping to tidy resolutions or binary futures of salvation and doom, and instead remain with the tangled, embodied present. In narrative terms, it is a willingness to see and tell differently—to allow ambiguity and contradiction, trusting that new forms of life can grow in the knots we refuse to cut.
Beautiful.
Now, if you’re thinking, “Ok, great — but so what?” … consider this: She unknots the tight logics and assumptions that underpin almost every aspect of our North Atlantic knowledge practice — loosening what we thought was fixed, and opening genuinely new ways of seeing, relating and thinking.
Haraway’s body of work continues to have a big influence on our House: in our approach to strategy, organisational discourse, strategic narrative, positioning, propositions and more. You will hear her voice as we begin to roll out our own thoughts and offerings. For now it just feels great to be introducing you to her.
Better questions
It might be silly, but I feel rather proud and rather emotional that there are so many echoes of Haraway’s thoughts in discourse nowadays. The groundswell is growing. Haraway’s worlds seem to resonate ever more deeply as I grow older. I have always embraced her thoughts not as abstracted theory, but as a supremely pragmatic perspective on, and approach to, life itself.
As is so often with the thinkers that influence me the most, they do not necessarily answer my questions. But they do inspire me to keep asking better ones.
Be splendid.
— Steve
Key reading
- A Cyborg Manifesto
Haraway, D. J. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). Routledge. (Original work published 1985) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto - Situated Knowledges
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 183–201). Routledge. (Original work published 1988) https://philpapers.org/archive/harskt.pdf - Staying with the Trouble
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q
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