Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam in Conversation (April 22, 2021—excerpt)

Abstract

Banu Subramaniam (BS): I'm struck again and again about the kind of erasures that happen in academic discourse. I think it was several years ago when the field of genetics "discovered" gender! I remember reading a piece, about this, I think it was in Nature-and there was no mention of feminist work at all. Below, Anne Fausto-Sterling had a comment pointing out that feminist have been making this point for almost 30 years! Yet, the insight was absorbed but no credit given. And it's not just within the sciences, this happens across different disciplines. We repeatedly find that achievements of feminists, indigenous, queer, and other scholars of color get erased, but the knowledge project moves on in a slightly different form. Ultimately the work gets completely cut off from those activists and the political project that feminist technosciences. I wonder how you see your own work and how it has been taken up within feminist technosciences versus in the sciences. Do you see these tensions in how your work gets taken up? Donna Haraway (DH): Oh yes, absolutely. Before I address that in more detail, I want to affirm that sense of repeated erasure, repeated disappearing. And I think that the folks who have been most eloquent on this are Indigenous scholars, who have been disappeared in terms of their grappling with health and science and land and food, in terms of grappling with these issues that I think are feminist science studies issues. I'm thinking, of the current generation, people like Zoe Author BiosDonna Haraway has written extensively about sciences, technologies, feminisms, and both human and more-than-human beings in inheriting, making, and sustaining diverse worlds. Story telling is one of her principal foci.

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“… 2. CD is an analytical device for Narrative Productions Methodology (Balasch et al, 2022) informed by Haraway’s epistemological principles (situated knowledges and diffraction). In contrast to considering that narratives reflect the inner world of narrating subjects, diffraction implies that they are the materialization of “interference patterns” (Haraway, 1997, p. 16). These interference patterns derive from partial connections between subjects that are diversely positioned in axes of social difference: the researcher, the informant, and the audience of the text.…”