Donna Jeanne Haraway (born September 6, 1944) is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

, and a prominent scholar in the field of

science and technology studies Science and technology studies (STS) or science, technology, and society is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. Histo ...

. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and

feminist theory Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or Philosophy, philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's Gender role, social roles, experiences, intere ...

, and is a leading scholar in contemporary

ecofeminism Ecofeminism integrates feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyze relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her 1974 ...

. Her work criticizes

anthropocentrism Anthropocentrism ( ) is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity on the planet. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From a ...

, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics. Haraway has taught

women's studies Women's studies is an academic field that draws on Feminism, feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining Social constructionism, social and cultural constructs of gender; ...

and the

history of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient history, ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural science, natural, social science, social, and formal science, formal. Pr ...

at the

University of Hawaii A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly ...

(1971–1974) and

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

(1974–1980). She began working as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980 where she became the first tenured professor in feminist theory in the United States. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human–machine and human–animal relations. Her work has sparked debate in

primatology Primatology is the scientific study of non-human primates. It is a diverse discipline at the boundary between mammalogy and anthropology, and researchers can be found in academic departments of anatomy, anthropology, biology, medicine, psychol ...

philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

, and

developmental biology Developmental biology is the study of the process by which animals and plants grow and develop. Developmental biology also encompasses the biology of Regeneration (biology), regeneration, asexual reproduction, metamorphosis, and the growth and di ...

. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book ''Modest_Witness'' for which she received the

Society for Social Studies of Science The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is a non-profit scholarly association devoted to the social studies of science and technology (STS). It was founded in 1975 and it has grown considerably over the years. In 2024, over 3,000 people ...

's (4S)

Ludwik Fleck Prize The Ludwik Fleck Prize is an annual award given for a book in the field of science and technology studies. It was created by the 4S Council (Society for the Social Studies of Science) in 1992 and is named after microbiologist Ludwik Fleck. The pr ...

in 1999. She was also awarded the

American Sociological Association The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fi ...

's Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology's Robert K. Merton award in 1992 for her work ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science.'' In 2017, Haraway was awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal, one of the highest honors for alumni of

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

. In 2021, Haraway received the Nuevo León Alfonso Reyes Prize for imagining new horizons for the fusion of science, humanities, biology, and philosophy. In 2025, she was awarded the

Erasmus Prize The Erasmus Prize is an annual prize awarded by the board of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions that have made exceptional contributions to culture, society, or social science in Europe and the rest of the world. I ...

Biography

Early life

Donna Jeanne Haraway was born on September 6, 1944, in

Denver, Colorado Denver ( ) is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Consolidated city and county, consolidated city and county, the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Colorado, most populous city of the U.S. state of ...

. Her father, Frank O. Haraway, was a sportswriter for ''

The Denver Post ''The Denver Post'' is a daily newspaper and website published in the Denver metropolitan area. it has an average print circulation of 57,265. In 2016, its website received roughly six million monthly unique visitors generating more than 13 mil ...

''. Her mother, Dorothy Mcguire Haraway, who came from an Irish Catholic background, died from a heart attack when Haraway was 16 years old. Haraway attended high school at St. Mary's Academy in

Cherry Hills Village, Colorado The City of Cherry Hills Village is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Home rule municipality, home rule city located in Arapahoe County, Colorado, Arapahoe County, Colorado, United States. Just south of Denver, the city population was 6,442 at ...

. Although she is no longer religious, Catholicism had a strong influence on her as she was taught by nuns in her early life. The impression of the eucharist influenced her linkage of the figurative and the material.

Education

Haraway majored in zoology, with minors in philosophy and English at the

Colorado College Colorado College is a private college, private liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Founded in 1874 by Thomas Nelson Haskell in his daughter's memory, the college offers over 40 majors a ...

, on the full-tuition Boettcher Scholarship. After college, Haraway moved to

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and studied evolutionary philosophy and theology at the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin on a

Fulbright scholarship The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States cultural exchange programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

in 1972 writing a dissertation about the use of metaphor in shaping experiments in experimental biology titled ''The Search for Organizing Relations: An Organismic Paradigm in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology.'' Her dissertation was later edited into a book and published under the title ''Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology''.

Later work

Haraway was the recipient of several scholarships. In 1999, Haraway received the

's (4S)

. In September 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's highest honor, the J. D. Bernal Award, for her "distinguished contributions" to the field. Haraway's most famous essay was published in 1985: "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s" and was characterized as "an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism". Donna Haraway 2016

In Haraway's thesis, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988), she means to expose the myth of scientific objectivity. Haraway defined the term "situated knowledges" as a means of understanding that all knowledge comes from positional perspectives. Our positionality inherently determines what it is possible to know about an object of interest. Comprehending situated knowledge "allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see". Without this accountability, the implicit biases and societal stigmas of the researcher's community are twisted into ground truth from which to build assumptions and hypothesis. Haraway's ideas in "Situated Knowledges" were heavily influenced by conversations with Nancy Hartsock and other feminist philosophers and activists. Her book ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science'' (1989) critically focuses on primate research through a feminist lens in order to understand how heterosexual ideology is reflected in primatology. Currently, Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She lives north of San Francisco with her partner, Rusten Hogness. Haraway has stated that she tries to incorporate collective thinking and all perspectives into her work: "I notice if I have cited nothing but white people, if I have erased indigenous people, if I forget non-human beings, etc. ... You know, I run through some old-fashioned, klutzy categories. Race, sex, class, region, sexuality, gender, species ... I know how fraught all those categories are, but I think those categories still do important work."

Major themes

"A Cyborg Manifesto"

In 1985, Haraway published the essay "Manifesto for

Cyborg A cyborg (, a portmanteau of ''cybernetics, cybernetic'' and ''organism'') is a being with both Organic matter, organic and biomechatronic body parts. The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline.Socialist Review''. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to the feminist narratives of the twentieth century. For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response to the rising conservatism during the 1980s in the United States at a critical juncture at which feminists, to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination." Women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such.

Cyborg feminism

In her updated essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in her book ''Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature'' (1991), Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. The manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism by revealing how men have exploited women's reproduction labor, providing a barrier for women to reach full equality in the labor market. She later discussed her thoughts on ''A Cyborg Manifesto'', gender and 'post-gender' in 2006, critiquing distinct and imposed categories; "people are made to live several non-isomorphic categories simultaneously, all of which torque them".

''Primate Visions''

Haraway also writes about the

and

. In ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science'' (1990), she focused on the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of

. She asserted that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females

hat A hat is a Headgear, head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorpor ...

facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions". She contended that female primatologists focus on different observations that require more communication and basic survival activities, offering very different perspectives of the origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted ones. Drawing on examples of Western narratives and

ideologies An ideology is a set of beliefs or values attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Form ...

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

, race and

class Class, Classes, or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used d ...

, Haraway questioned the most fundamental constructions of scientific human nature stories based on primates. In ''Primate Visions'', she wrote:

My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisions of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially about survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told within western traditions of that complex genre.

Haraway's aim for science is "to reveal the limits and impossibility of its ' objectivity' and to consider some recent revisions offered by feminist primatologists". Haraway presents an alternative perspective to the accepted ideologies that continue to shape the way scientific human nature stories are created. Haraway urges feminists to be more involved in the world of technoscience and to be credited for that involvement. In a 1997 publication, she remarked:

I want feminists to be enrolled more tightly in the meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building. I also want feminist—activists, cultural producers, scientists, engineers, and scholars (all overlapping categories) — to be recognized for the articulations and enrollment we have been making all along within technoscience, in spite of the ignorance of most "mainstream" scholars in their characterization (or lack of characterizations) of feminism in relation to both technoscientific practice and technoscience studies.

''Make Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations''

Haraway created a panel called "Make Kin not Babies" in 2015 with five other feminist thinkers. The panel's emphasis was on moving human numbers down while paying attention to factors, such as the environment, race, and class. A key phrase of Haraway's is "Making babies is different than giving babies a good childhood." She and another panelist, Adele Clarke, later published the corresponding book ''Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations''.

Speculative fabulation

Speculative fabulation is a concept that is included in many of Haraway's works. It includes all of the wild facts that will not hold still, and it indicates a mode of creativity and the story of the Anthropocene. Haraway stresses how this does not mean it is not a fact. In ''Staying with the Trouble'', she defines speculative fabulation as "a mode of attention, theory of history, and a practice of worlding," and she finds it an integral part of scholarly writing and everyday life. In Haraway's work she addresses a feminist speculative fabulation and its focusing on making kin instead of babies to ensure the good childhood of all children while controlling the population. ''Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations'' highlights practices and proposals to implement this theory in society.

''The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness''

The companion Species Manifesto is to be read as a “personal document”. This work was written to tell the story of

cohabitation Cohabitation is an arrangement where people who are not legally married live together as a couple. They are often involved in a Romance (love), romantic or Sexual intercourse, sexually intimate relationship on a long-term or permanent basis. ...

coevolution In biology, coevolution occurs when two or more species reciprocally affect each other's evolution through the process of natural selection. The term sometimes is used for two traits in the same species affecting each other's evolution, as well a ...

and embodied cross-species sociality. Haraway argues that humans ‘companion’ relationship with dogs can show us the importance of recognizing differences and ‘how to engage with significant otherness'. The link between humans and animals like dogs can show people how to interact with other humans and nonhumans. Haraway believes that we should be using the term "companion species" instead of "companion animals" because of the relationships we can learn through them.

Critical responses to Haraway

Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague" and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way". Several reviewers have argued that her understanding of the scientific method is questionable, and that her explorations of epistemology at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free. A 1991 review of Haraway's ''Primate Visions'', published in the '' International Journal of Primatology'', provides some of the most common criticisms of her view of science, and a 1990 review in the '' American Journal of Primatology'', offers a similarly dismissive commentary. In reviewing the book for the '' Journal of the History of Biology'', sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, who has written extensively on the

social construction of gender The social construction of gender is a theory in the humanities and social sciences about the manifestation of cultural origins, mechanisms, and corollaries of gender perception and expression in the context of interpersonal and group social inter ...

, sexual identity,

gender identity Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it. In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent and consistent with the in ...

gender role A gender role, or sex role, is a social norm deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The specifics regarding these gendered ...

s, and

intersexuality Intersex people are those born with any of several Sexual characteristics, sex characteristics, including chromosome patterns, gonads, or sex organ, genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human ...

, wrote that the book is "important," though she wished it "were easier to read." In 2017, '' ArtReview'' named Haraway the third most influential person in the contemporary art world, stating that her work "has become part of the art world’s DNA".

Publications

* ''When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway,'' Nicholas Gane: Theory, Culture and Society, 2006. Vol 23 (7–8),135-158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406069228 * ''Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology'', New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. * ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science'', Routledge: New York and London, 1989. * ''Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature'', New York: Routledge, and London: Free Association Books, 1991 (includes "A Cyborg Manifesto"). * ''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience'', New York: Routledge, 1997 (winner of the

). * ''How Like a Leaf: A Conversation with Donna J. Haraway'', Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, New York: Routledge, 1999. * ''The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness'', Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. * ''When Species Meet'', Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. *''The Haraway Reader,'' New York: Routledge, 2004, . * '' Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene'', Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. *''Manifestly Haraway'', Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. *''Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations'', Donna J. Haraway and Adele Clarke, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018. .

References

External links

Donna Haraway
Faculty webpage at UC Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness Program
''Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival''
a film by Fabrizio Terranova {{DEFAULTSORT:Haraway, Donna Living people 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American philosophers Colorado College alumni American feminist writers Feminist studies scholars Historians of science Educators from Denver Primatologists Posthumanists Postmodern feminists American socialist feminists University of California, Santa Cruz faculty American women philosophers Yale University alumni Metaphor theorists American women sociologists American sociologists Philosophers of science American philosophers of technology Philosophers of religion Philosophers from Hawaii Philosophers from California Philosophers of mind American transhumanists University of Hawaiʻi faculty Johns Hopkins University faculty American Book Award winners American people of Irish descent American zoologists Philosophers from Colorado 21st-century American women 20th-century American women 1944 births Cybernetics Cyberneticists Women cyberneticists