(((Knowledge Ecology)))

I’m uploading Sam Mickey’s talk from the Haraway panel at AAR yesterday (See below for audio from Haraway’s own talk). The talk is missing the first 30 seconds, the rest is complete. Sam is a good friend, colleague, and adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. Enjoy.

Sam Mickey – Farfetchings for Respecting Species: Postsecular Posthumanities and the SF Mode

ABSTRACT:  Donna Haraway describes herself as a theorist in the SF mode (S stands variously for “science” and “speculative” and F for “fiction,” “fact,” “fabulation,” and “feminism”).  The SF mode is an integral component of Haraway’s contributions to inquiries into animals and their entanglements in the sacred-secular boundary projects of technoscience and religion.  Those contributions involve Haraway’s concepts of companion species, god tricks, and sacramental consciousness, which affirm co-constitutive relations between terms of dichotomies such as human/animal, nature/culture, fact/value, and secular/sacred.  Such concepts situate Haraway in the emerging postsecular posthumanities.  However, “post-” discourses can oversimplify Haraway’s concepts by closing or fixing the meanings of contested categories (e.g., secular, sacred, human, animal) and thus effacing the specificities and unruly complexities of interspecies relations.  In contrast, the “farfetchings” and speculative realism of the SF mode prevent such closure, maintaining a creative and risky openness that facilitates respectful contact between humans and other species.