Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web

Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web explores the impact of major theorist, Donna Haraway, in such diverse areas as feminisms, Marxism, new materialism, science studies, posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism, digital media, and life narrative.

The book shows how Haraway’s decades-long career as a major theoretical voice and provocateur of thinking about new and complex connections across technology, species, and disciplines has generated bold experiments in writing from the perspective and senses of non-human species, in photographic self-portraiture of bodily life, in animating the lives of scientists, in radical genealogy, in playful teaching methods and much more. Focusing on the ways in which Haraway’s oeuvre have affected and will continue to challenge life narrative theory and practice, the chapters in this book present cross-disciplinary perspectives which are both personal and critical. As scholars, students and activists inspired by Haraway’s work, these essays together ask all of us to think about where we place ourselves in an age of environmental crisis and how to live in a ’natureculture web’ which is as fragile as it is beautiful.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Cynthia Huff, an English Studies Professor Emerita at Illinois State University, has co-authored with Joel Haefner, ＂His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and the Posthuman＂and authored ＂Framing Canine Memoirs＂ and ＂’Forward!’ National Identity, Animalographies, and the Ethics of Representation in the Posthuman Imaginary.＂ She has also published extensively on diaries, Victorian literature, and women’s life writing.

Margaretta Jolly is Professor of Cultural Studies and directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex. Her work has focused on auto/biography, letter writing and oral history, particularly in relation to women’s movements. She published Thank you, Madagascar: The Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly, her late mother’s last book, in 2015.