Instructions

From cyborg anthropologist Donna Haraway’s prestigious Pilgrim Acceptance Speech,

The British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who wrote The Gender of the Gift based on her ethnographic work in highland Papua New Guinea (Mt. Hagen), taught me that “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with)” (Reproducing the Future 10)…

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories…

Isabelle insists we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world…

Cyborgs were never just about the interdigitations of humans and information machines; cyborgs were from the get-go the materialization of imploded (not hybridized) human beings-information machines-multispecies organisms. Cyborgs were always simultaneously relentlessly real and inescapably fabulated. Like all good SF, they redid what counts as—what is—real.

Please write a 250+ word cyborgian speculative fabulation (a particular form of science fiction) concerning your final paper topic. Through speculative fabulation, Haraway encourages us to consider a future for those who don’t typically get written about (in particular, marginalized individuals and communities) and to write with “tentacular thinking“, a way of acknowledging the many relations of earth, animal, human and technology. In your short piece, describe a scene where your technology intersects with a particular individual and describe an achievement, a competition, an arrest, a trial, a celebration, a realization that gives us some kind of empowerment narrative or warning for the future. This exercise will be critical for informing “why is this important” for your final paper.