A Cyborg Manifesto: 1985-2025
A 5-session class revisiting Donna Haraway’s iconic manifesto, 40 years later.
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Class Description:
In 1985, feminist theorist Donna Haraway penned what would become one of the most prescient essays of the late 20th century: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.
Writing at the dawn of the personal computer era, Haraway imagined a world where the boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, mind and body would collapse — and argued this wasn't something to fear, but a radical opportunity to reimagine identity, power, and liberation itself. Four decades later, we are living in Haraway's cyborg world. We carry computers more powerful than anything she could have imagined, our bodies are monitored by sensors, our relationships mediated by algorithms, and our very sense of self shaped by digital networks. Yet rather than the liberatory potential Haraway envisioned, we often find ourselves trapped by the same old hierarchies — now amplified by surveillance capitalism, algorithmic bias, and platform monopolies. AI therapists. Facial recognition surveillance. Predictive policing. Attention-hacking social media platforms. What are we to do about these technologically-mediated systems of control? Haraway’s cyborg offers a path forward: a noninnocent, unfaithful, trickster that plays in the ruins of Silicon Valley fantasies.
Together, we will conduct a careful analysis of Haraway's manifesto itself, unpacking its dense weave of feminist theory, technoscience critique, and utopian imagination. We will trace how her cyborg travels through today's technological landscape — from the social media algorithms that shape our desires to the climate technologies that promise to save or doom us.
Through collaborative investigations and embodied experiments, we will explore what it means to live as cyborgs in an age when the boundary between human and machine has not disappeared but proliferated into a thousand new sites of struggle and possibility. This class will equip you with both the theoretical tools and the practical awareness to navigate our contemporary cyborg condition.