Honoring Donna Haraway - Symposia and Key-note Speech

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by Alyssa Battistoni

For three days this October, Yale welcomed the historian of science and feminist theorist Donna Haraway to campus as the recipient of this year’s Wilbur L. Cross Medal for Distinguished Alumni, awarded annually to an alumnus of Yale’s graduate school. Haraway received a PhD in Biology from Yale in 1972, and is now Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

Haraway’s keynote address, “Making Oddkin: Storytelling for Earthly Survival,” was delivered to a packed house at the Whitney Humanities Center. Drawing on art and biology, fiction and politics, following Navajo sheep, Inuit seals, and Taiwanese dogs, Haraway told stories of a series of “contact zones” where creatures enter into relationships with one another, offering us lessons for “living on a damaged planet.”   

The commemorative events also included two symposiums featuring scholars and former students inspired by Haraway’s work and reflecting on its significance. The first was organized around Haraway’s classic 1984 text “Cyborg Manifesto,” featuring Marisol de la Cadeña, Alison Kafer, Lisa Messeri, and Caren Kaplan. The second, on Haraway’s first book, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (originally written as her Yale dissertation) was, fittingly, conducted in the Peabody Museum’s sparkling Hall of Minerals, and featured talks by Natasha Myers, Juno Parreñas, Zoe Todd, and Angela Willey. Professor Haraway also met with current graduate students to share insights and experiences from her time at Yale and her career since.

At the award dinner, Haraway was presented with the Wilbur Cross medal engraved with language collectively generated by the Science Studies Working Group: “To Donna J. Haraway Ph.D. 1972 / Feminist Technoscientist / Manifester of Cyborgs / Significant Other of Multispecies Kin.”

Simultaneously scholarly and celebratory, bringing together a wide array of researchers from across Yale and beyond, the events were a fitting tribute to Haraway’s groundbreaking research, her embrace of collaborative thinking, her commitment to social justice, and her joy in learning.

The events were organized by Joanna Radin, assistant professor of HSHM, and Inderpal Grewal, professor of WGSS. They received support from the WGSS and HSHM programs, the Mandelbaum and Byrnes Fund for LGBT Studies, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, and the Departments of American Studies and Sociology.