The work of Donna Haraway weaves disciplines into living ideas that challenge binaries and invite richer and different forms of sense-making. From her cyborg manifesto to Staying with the Trouble, she offers not clear answers, but instead invites us to seek out better questions.

What better place to write our first post than with a quick 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 huge influence on our House. It’s why one of her quotes heads up our new site.

Haraway (it feels funny writing her name like that after having followed her for decades) is a professor in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an eclectic multis-pecies eco-feminist, technologist, zoologist and biologist.

Her work doesn’t so much transcend boundaries—disciplinary, conceptual, and linguistic—as make them liquid, permeable, and transforms them into something else entirely. She weaves feminist theory, science and technology studies, biology, philosophy, literature, and science fiction into intricate intellectual and pragmatic generative tapestries.

We love her refusal to strip complexity from life. It might make her work challenging for some, 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”—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, Haraway’s 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. It was also 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).

I continued to dip in and out of Haraway’s work over the decades, always seduced by her thoughts. Some years later, when I read the introduction to Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene from 2016, 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.”

Why was I moved to tears? Well, it just rang so true. It is what I see around me in both my personal and professional life: narratives of utopia and dystopia, stories of good and evil, right and wrong. Why are North Atlantic lullabies always so binary? Why do we insist on reducing, flattening and abstracting our gloriously messy lives so? Haraway’s words captured that essence.

Reading her words gave me hope then. And it feels incredible to see Haraway’s concepts emerging into the mainstream.

Echoes of Haraway

Timely like no other, I hear powerful echoes and patterns of Haraway’s thought in the empathic ‘complexity poetics’ of Nora Bateson and her thoughts around warm data. I hear them in the work of Ellie Snowden and Dave Snowden’s references to  New Materialism. 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 in the work of Dr. Renée Lertzman, to whom I offer thanks for the opportunity she afforded me to step up my narrative game.

There is so much to learn from Haraway it is hard to know where to begin.

So, in the spirit of post-humanism, and with sprinkling of our applied narratology, here is a thread of a few of her concepts as woven by your local friendly LLM.

Becoming the Cyborg

‘They’ is a hybrid of machine and organism, refusing the neat divisions of human/animal, organic/machine and physical/non-physical 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 North Atlantic thought—a way to live inside complexity 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 peculiarly Western 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—maintaining the systemic status quo. Breaking binaries does not erase difference; it dissolves the false walls that keep difference from becoming relationship.

Decentring the individual

Once those false walls fall, the figure at the centre—the isolated, autonomous self—also begins to loosen its hold. Haraway’s work decentres the individual, refusing 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.

Conscious 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.

Staying with the Trouble

Haraway reminds us that this work is not clean or linear. To live in this way 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 an invitation 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.

One of the key things I take from Haraway’s work is that this thing we keep calling complexity is best not treated as something to “navigate” or “embrace”. Or thought of as a space in which to categorise, slice, dice, change, solve, rationalise, leverage and engineer. Instead, complexity is a generative space where, if we literally stay with the trouble, we can facilitate new ways of seeing and sense-making—and open new discursive spaces—exactly as Haraway does with her own work.

We will explore this and Haraway’s ideas much more over time. But for now it feels great to at least set up the conversation.

Exciting!

Better questions

I’m not sure why, but I feel rather emotional that there are so many echoes of Haraway’s thoughts in discourse nowadays. As I literally finish writing this post I just saw this LinkedIn article Donna Haraway’s Top 10 Concepts for AI Literacy. And Michiel, our practice partner, just reminded me that Rotterdam’s Praemium Erasmianum, a prestigious cultural institution, awarded its 2025 Laureate Erasmus Prize to her.

Haraway’s thinking resonates as deeply with me now as it did then. I embrace her not so much as a feminist politic but as a supremely pragmatic perspective on, and approach to, life.

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.

Thank you, Donna.

Be splendid.

— Steve