Teaching and Transformation: Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and Its Influence in Computer-Supported Composition Classrooms

Abstract

In an increasingly global and post-modern world marked by rapid technological, political, and social change, teachers at all\rlevels face the difficult if not impossible challenge of preparing a coming generation for a world that they, themselves,\rhave never seen or experienced (Mead, 1970). Within this context, Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” has offered a broad\rrange of humanist teachers and scholars a challenge and the possibility of hope.\r\rIn part, it is Haraway’s interdisciplinary background in philosophy, biology, and English that has made her work so important\rto such a wide range of scholars. She earned her Ph.D. in biology from Yale in 1976 and has since helped to articulate and\rexplore the interconnections among language, science, and technology both as a scholar and as a teacher in the History of\rConsciousness program at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her major works include Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century 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 (1991a), and Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan©MeetsOncoMouseTM (1997). Haraway’s theory of “situated knowledges” (1991b), however, has also proven instrumental to feminist, post-colonial,\rand technology studies, emphasizing an approach to scientific inquiry that assigns agency to our “objects of knowledge” and\rrefuses to view them as “a screen or ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic”\r(1991b: 198). Her critique of objectivity has extended to Marxist/socialist feminist and cultural theories that provide totalizing\ror essentializing explanations of self and society. For Haraway, “partiality” as opposed to “universality” (1991b: 195), ambiguity\ras opposed to certainty, provide more productive ground for both feminist theory and epistemology.