Donna Haraway

“Standpoint theory was never supposed to be a theory about identity.”

In this episode, we speak with Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Donna tells us about how deeply their thinking and activism was informed by close feminist friendships with Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock, beginning in the 1980s in the context of Marxist feminist collectives in Baltimore, and also by a lifetime of friendly, if sometimes contentious, debate with Bruno Latour.

We discuss what’s troublesome about the spatial metaphors of “standing and pointing” and why standpoints should be understood as dynamic, crafted and collective work objects. We also talk about what happens when standpoints are no longer adequate to the complexities of the world, and how to navigate situations where friends and allies find they disagree fundamentally, not so much theoretically but in starkly pragmatic terms. There is much wisdom here about learning how to recognize when you are wrong, what we can learn from human and more-than-human others, and how to collectively fight for a better world.

Works discussed TBD.

Edited by Karoline Paier, Alex Bryant

Mixed by Lilith Charlet

Illustrations by Rachel Cripps

Music by The Years from the ⁠Free Music Archive⁠ licensed under an ⁠Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License⁠.