Donna Haraway - Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Donna Haraway lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute, April 25, 2017.
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Joint Visiting Artists and Scholars and Graduate Lecture Series Event
Introduction by Nicole Archer
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway’s latest book, Staying with the Trouble, offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and its inhabitants. Haraway will discuss why learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth might provide a means to build more livable futures. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[@elzah100]

Im only here to learn how to read "Chthulucene"

[@hyacinthedelasinthomee9291]

Haraway enters 6:55

[@profdeweycsum4801]

It is just me or does title card stays up til about14:40 when video starts (not synced with audio)? Audio starts at 0:00 and stays ahead of video throughout? Is there an archived version of the talk that has synchronized audio and video?

[@scottpilgrim8164]

i am really sad that i am excluded from the discourse because i will always lack both academic and mass acknowledgement meaning i will always be a thread out of this woven loom of voices donna depicts

[@Peace2051]

Scott, don't give in to these feelings of exclusion. You can't always measure the effect you have on those around you in your work and social contacts.

[@RedstonerD]

I don't think a thread is less important than a seam. the discourse is the whole garment, it's not only the borders where change happens.

[@rorynolan4426]

is there a transcript of this lecture somewhere?

[@JoshuaShepherd]

Amazing. I readily accept some people are orders of magnitude smarter than I. I feel good vibes from where she's heading but not without a sense that some of it is jargon for jargon's sake, and a bit of self-aggrandizement through the vaunted capitalistic virtue of complexity. Or maybe I'm simply too dense. Who's going to translate this? We've got to come down from our towers, and up from our rabbit holes to communicate accessibly. The growing fascistic politic has a very low barrier to entry. We fail to demonstrate a viable and even alluring alternative at our peril.

[@nojusticeanywhere]

she's being poetic about how people both isolate themselves and create echo chambers in their communities while simultaneously are gatekeepers of their community knowledge.While the left struggle with this, fascism is very easy to push on lower working class white folks through fear mongering and hatred. This anger is easily manipulated and directed at those they struggle beside considering all their struggles are intertwined with people of color, LGBTQ folks and people with disabilities. The left,scientists and socially progressive thinkers need to create accessible ways of understanding the knowledge they have gained to disseminate to the lower class.

[@whiningon6469]

I really enjoy the work of Ralph stacey on complexity.... (complexity >> paradox + vitality >> self-organization >> novelty as emergence) x ongoing-process at all scales of existence

[@AudioPervert1]

the audio video sync is totally messed up

[@peterhammer9188]

Hello @SFAI - the audio and video in this post is hopelessly out of sync. Can you re-upload a proper version of the lecture? Thank you!

[@OliverWallaceStories]

unfortunately the video sync has gone BADLY wrong... SFAI could you look at fixing it?

[@pollinatorparkways1541]

Oh hey! at 1:26:15 she's talking about Pollinator Parkways! "Young activist" eh? I'll take it!

[@rorynolan4426]

that is severely cool my dude!

[@CN-ug3qt]

bookmark 33:42

[@charleskvb9256]

Yes yes essentialism is the sign of male domination but cyberfeminism is the sign of female domination. Girl's Power for ever and ever

[@senagur5035]

what's wrong with the English subtitles :OO

[@magnusjmj]

Well, you'd expect auto-generated English subtitles to work poorly. She's barely speaking English.

[@senagur5035]

@@magnusjmj haha

[@jonaswunderkind4580]

@@magnusjmj :D good one haha jesus what a word salad

[@copypaste3526]

I don't think digital literacy such as coding will ever be as big as reading. Just as the literacy in sculpting never was as high as reading. Wait... didn't they all sculpt in 'prehistoric' times? So maybe coding could become like that. A skill that is required to function as an engaging human. But then again, we do not need to code to create digitally and interact online. Still a lot of kids in the 'west' are being teached coding nowadays. Could coding even be affecting our spoken language then? Writing a paper or thesis already works a little as coding, as we can see in mark-up languages. As it looks now, media literacy, especially coding is a privilege skill. It requires tools and time that are simply not available to most people who do not live in socially privileged areas. I wonder how this will play out.

[@ThoughtTheif]

copy paste I agree. coding is not accessable to everyone.

[@Lee-iq7wg]

Please say more, or recommend readings?

[@tobiaszb]

You can see enormous work by Stephen Wolfram to create language in between humans and machines understandable both ways. It might be easier in the future.

[@artexetra]

It is regrettable that the work of many brilliant humanist scholars like Haraway is inaccessible gobbledegook to popular audiences. But we don't lament that scientists use languages that popular audiences can't understand. Humanist scholars typically are not speaking to popular audiences any more than scientists are. They are speaking to specialized audiences of humanist scholars. Just as scientists have developed unique languages within their disciplines in order to share specialized information with their colleagues, so humanist scholars have developed unique language to share specialized information with their colleagues. Neither scientists nor humanists could do their work effectively using just lay terms. In fact, Haraway intentionally creates new terms and metaphors in order to permit new ideas to emerge that existing language and metaphors could not express. This is different than jargon for jargon's sake, though I'll grant that there is plenty of that in academia! There are, of course, exceptions in science, like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who are able to translate science for popular audiences. Although Haraway is not a populizer herself, her ideas have seeped into culture through other popularizers and from her work being required reading for thousands if not millions of college students over the years. I love the idea of "making kin," which is similar to a core value of the indigenous people of the Americas. Back in 2000 Rarámuri scholar Enrique Salmón called this"Kincentric Ecology."

[@eugeniaventura1326]

Hi, can you outline three ways in which the Climate justice movement might mobilise people to move towards what Haraway calls 'multispecies environmental justice'?

[@JohnGottschalk]

9:23 onwards : what is she saying?

[@JohnGottschalk]

"Making with for sim by isus"?

[@tgc8209]

@@JohnGottschalk she's saying "the necessity for 'making with' or ''sympoiesis'"

[@cenkguzelis308]

@@JohnGottschalk sympoiesis**

[@comradesatan9929]

Donna, listen, the way you talk about population is actually malthusian even if you say it isn't. If you were really concerned about it, you'd look into studies of population dynanics and immediately realize that it's capitalism and empire that drive excess population growth, and even if the growth ceased capitalism would destroy the planet. Humans do not reproduce like fruit flies, there are social and cultural factors that play heavily into our decisions to have children or not. You don't need to discourage people from reproducing to save the planet, you need to dismantle capitalism and hierarchy. Doing so, and taking care of people's needs in an egalitarian way, leads to population stability; most people don't want to raise a ton of kids, that's a lot of work. So stop handing the eco fascists and neo malthusians ideological legitimacy, and until you renounce these views I will treat you as one of them. You claim to not be racist while promulgating racist views to the sort of people who really could, and sometimes do, actually engage in anti-racist action. In that way, you're worse than an Alex Jones, who only appeals to those who are already racist. So from a potential comrade: fucking stop it. Renounce that shit. Watch Bookchin's speech on Nature and Ideology, or just do any legitimate research into this issue you hubristically discuss as though you understand it. Population isn't destroying the planet, militarization and capitalism are. Stop doing the latter so many favors.

[@eugeniaventura1326]

Hi hope you're ok. Can you outline three ways in which the Climate justice movement might mobilise people to move towards what Haraway calls 'multispecies environmental justice'?

[@deshrektives]

He can’t. He’s too stupid.

[@jonaswunderkind4580]

This postmodern word salad is so annoying..

[@bishaldey5339]

salads are good for health

[@enricomarchesini1868]

@@bishaldey5339 but this salad is fully immersed in olive oil.

[@bishaldey5339]

@@enricomarchesini1868 olive oil literally prevents cancer

[@enricomarchesini1868]

@@bishaldey5339 completely irrelevant. I'm fucking italian so of course I use olive oil for my salad. But I don't drink it otherwise it literally clogs my arteries :)... But the property of olive oil doesn't matter that much. I'm more interested in knowing which elements of the conference u find interesting?

[@bishaldey5339]

@@enricomarchesini1868 it's completely irrelevant what I find interesting. just reacting to the ignorant comments above about the lecture being a word salad or immersed in olive oil.

[@Geops108]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong