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| Donna Haraway is a professor
in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California
at Santa Cruz, where she teaches feminist theory, science studies,
and women's studies. She is the author of Crystals, Fabrics
and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Centure Developmental
Biology, 1976; Primate Visions: Gender,
Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, 1989,
1992; Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature, 1991; Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets
OncoMouse™, 1997; and The Companion
Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness,
2003. Her present project, Birth of the Kennel, analyzes
webs of action in dog-human cultures. |
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Companions in NatureCultures:
Dogs, Cyborgs, and their Familiars
*Cancelled*
Thurman J. White Forum Conference Center (OCCE)
University of Oklahoma, Norman Campus
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The class will examine
ways humans can understand the stories and the
realities of our relationships with animals and machines. How
as
contemporary Westerners, with our ever expanding technological
cultures, do we express and experience the interplay of wild and
domestic, nature and culture, animal and human, organic and mechanical?
We will look at why these dualisms persist in both popular and
scientific cultures. The seminar will focus primarily on the odd
similarities and differences between cyborgs and companion species
in US cultures. Students will look at debates about rights, obligations,
skill, work, and love as these powerful categories describe our
ties to animals and machines in modern life. We will also explore
the work of amateur activists in health and genetics working in
dog cultures, as well as the odd ways in which racial and sexual
typologies do and do not map onto cybernetic machines and animals.
This class has been approved for “Humanities" and "Western
civilization & culture” gen ed credit by the OU Gen
Ed committee.
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The Class Reading List: (These books and articles supplied
by OSLEP)
Donna Haraway,
A Cyborg Manifesto from Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991,
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto:
Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2003.
Donna Haraway, Cloning
Mutts, Saving Tigers: Ethical Emergents in Technocultural Dog
Worlds, in Franklin, Sarah and Lock, Margaret,
eds., Remaking Life and Death: towards an anthropology of the
biosciences School of American Research Press, 2003.
Vicki Hearne, Horses, Hounds, and Jeffersonian
Happiness: What’s Wrong with Animal Rigthts?
(online at www.dogtrainingarts.com,
originally in September 1991, Harper’s)
Barbara Smuts, Encounters with Animal Minds
Journal of Communication Studies 8, no. 5-7
selection from Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures
Novels:
Animal Rights Novel
J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
(Princeton University Press, 1999)
Students will also read one of the following science fiction
novels and one of the dog stories.
Science fiction
John Varley, Blue Champagne (NY: Berkeley Books,
1986)
Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Space Woman
Marge Piercy, He, She, and It
Dog stories
Jack London, Call of the Wild
Donald McCaig, Nop’s Hope (New
York: The Lion’s Press, 1994)
J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip (New York:
New York Review Books, 1999)
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