Manifestly Haraway

What it is

Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) collects Donna Haraway's two foundational manifestos — A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) — with new commentary and a conversation between Haraway and Cary Wolfe. The cyborg essay is one of the most cited pieces of late-twentieth-century thought; reading it alongside the companion-species work reveals the through-line of Haraway's project: an insistence that the boundaries we draw between human, animal, and machine are political acts, and that better ones are possible.

Why it sits on our shelf

For speculative design practice, the most operationally useful thing Haraway gives us is a method for asking who is allowed into the future. The cyborg essay opens the boundary between human and machine; the companion-species essay opens the boundary between human and non-human animal. Both insist that the boundary-drawing is the work — not a precondition to the work.

This is directly applicable to speculative design briefs. The standard scenario sketches a future for humans, populated by consumer-product humans, with technology serving them and animals (if present at all) as scenery. Haraway insists this is a constrained imagination. A speculative future in which multi-species kinship, interspecies institutions, or machine partnerships are taken seriously is a much wider design space — and frequently a more politically and strategically generative one.

We also borrow Haraway's notion of staying with the trouble (from her later book of that title, also on this shelf) — the discipline of not resolving contradictions prematurely. This is functionally identical to the move we describe in NKD_3 about holding moral framings open. It is one of the few cases where the philosophy genuinely is the methodology.

A note on where we diverge: Haraway's prose style is, famously, dense. Students sometimes read her as gnomic rather than precise. We teach her by extracting specific operative claims from the manifestos and demonstrating their application — the discipline of making the philosophy load-bearing in design decisions, which is the move many readers miss on first encounter.

Where it lands in our practice

This book is a fixture in any of our courses that touch ethics, identity, technology, or non-human stakeholders — which is most of them. Specifically, it shapes how we run the framing workshop's stakeholder mapping (who is at the table, who is not, who is being assumed in or out), and it directly informs our cultural-semiotics teaching where the category "human" is one of the codes being examined.

What to read if this resonates

• •Staying with the Trouble (Haraway, 2016) — the longer working-through of the methodology these manifestos imply.
• •When Species Meet (Haraway, 2008) — the companion-species argument at book length.
• •Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism (Julia Watson) — applied non-human-included design, on this shelf already.
• •NKD_3 — The Moral Irreducibility of Outcomes