This year the TBD Reading Group, hosted by GeDIS and Soziologie der Diversität at University of Kassel, read Donna Haraway's “Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” (2016). In this book, theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to rethink and even remake our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants, including technological ones. She calls for a Chthulucene, an imaginary but also real epoch where humans and nonhumans are linked by an ethical imperative of response-ability. This requires to establish practices of living and dying well together that are based on sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Teaching how to stay with the trouble, Haraway brings the reader on a theoretical and methodological journey with the help of the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far.

Inspired by Haraway’s work, we invite you to discuss her ideas as tools for interdisciplinary work, and watch a documentary about Donna Haraway’s life and thought.

About the reading group

TBD (”To Be Defined”) is an interdisciplinary reading group on the intersections between Science and Technology Studies (STS), feminism, queer studies, posthumanism and new materialism. We are interested in engaging with works - both contemporary and otherwise - that deal with the relationships between technology, sexuality and culture. The group meets approximately once a month and is open to both “advanced readers” and “beginners”. The goal of it is not only to explore and discuss texts but also to present each other's work and get feedback for work-in-progress. It is hosted by research group Gender/Diversity in Informatics Systems and department of the Soziologie der Diversität at the University of Kassel.

This event is free of charge.

Image credits: DES Daughter, Flickr.com, license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).