Cyborgs Now: Haraway for 2019

futures thinkink 22 may

"One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code." (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985)

Workshop led by Katie Stone

Since the 1980s, feminisms have developed to reflect the kinds of intersectionality Haraway called for in her seminal essay. The application of linguistic sciences to how we conceive of the physical self, then and now, is paramount to conceptualising the play of gender in conceptions of the organic within a techno-scientific world. In this workshop we hope to expand on the examples given by Haraway to consider how technological advances shape our experiences of commodification and forced participation in the market, as both consumer and producer. Considering coding as a means of both writing and interpreting, we invite interested participants to join us in thinking about 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine' in the contemporary period. This workshop seeks to discuss what conceptual tasks we might assign the cyborg in today's world, and how we might self-narrativise within and without the integrated circuit of language and market. Katie Stone will frame 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in its historical context before opening the discussion in collaboration with Chelsea Haith on the topic of contemporary feminisms, locating the cyborg within potentially new, productive parameters of twenty-first century humanitarian concerns.

Katie Stone (she/her) is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis explores childhood and utopianism as imagined in science fiction. It seeks to put mainstream science fiction into conversation with feminist, queer and decolonial critical and creative work in order to interrogate the genre’s complicity with multiple structures of oppression. Katie is co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community and co-founder of the research network ‘Utopian Acts’ whose work will be featured in a forthcoming special issue of Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal. Katie has written for Foundation, Fantastika and SFRA Review and she is one of the founding members of the research collective ‘Beyond Gender’. She is on Twitter @cyborg_feminist.

A vegetarian and vegan-friendly lunch will be served, and the building is accessible. Please do contact us at futuresthinking@torch.ox.ac.uk if you have any access needs or requirements.

Please register via Eventbrite. 

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