Donna Haraway's work has always fascinated me, and this recent piece on how we can find new ways to encounter and live, grow, and die with other "peoples" (in the broadest sense of the term) is just as vital to my thinking today as Simians, Cyborgs, and Women was at the start of my academic career. Haraway's goal- to find ways of "making oddkin," refusing to take a technological, lazy optimist view of the future nor subscribe to nihilist futilism at what has already occurred, suggests we find ways to reach out in all the myriad creative, intersectional approaches we can muster.
The first half of the book is very dense, where Haraway lays out how she intends to connect her SF practices with attention to other "critters" in the world as the Sixth Great Extinction is already steam-rolling species diversity, habitats, and affecting marginalized, indigenous, and impoverished peoples most. Her idea that we need a new term for this epochal shift- rather than Anthropocene or Capitalocene- instead goes back to "chthonic" others- spiders, pigeons, fungi, and other creatures usually relegated to the compost bins of human attention. She turns instead away from post-humanist language to com-positions, staying together with the trouble.
I loved the second half of Haraway's book, as the chapters are short, full of loving craft, and bring out her ideas in novel ways that aren't usually seen in academic writing. Her last section about the Camillas is a storytelling encapsulation of the rest of her book. It's a fun read on its own, but you might need the other 7 chapters to understand what she means.
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