Donna Haraway & Anna Tsing

press release: Few scholars have been as influential as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing in imagining new ways of existing in a multispecies world at the edge of extinction. Join us for an evening of conversation with two creative and inspiring thinkers on the enduring legacies of plantations, the possibilities for life in the Anthropocene, and the potentiality of a planet shaped by symbiotic relations, what Haraway terms the Chthulucene, along with other real and imagined worlds.

Donna Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center. Donna trains seriously with dogs in the sport of agility, but mainly lives and plays with her companions, human and more than human.

Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2^nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). A feature-length film made by Fabrizio Terravova, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, was released in 2016. With Adele Clarke she has co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing. 

Anna Tsing is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Between 2013-2018, she was a Niels Bohr professor at Aarhus University and co-director of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene. She is the co-editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (with Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, University of Minnesota Press, 2017).  Her newest work is a digital project, in preparation, entitled Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene.