In this circle we will contend with one of Donna Haraway's most controversial and troubling pleas, that we human beings should ‘make kin, not babies’. Here we have to encounter the rage which roars beneath her humour and tickling goads, what she describes to Sarah Franklin as her ‘bone-deep fury, and horror, and fear, and not being happy’ with the way that human life is reproduced on this planet. Against accusations of Malthusianism and its attendant racism Haraway, with her inimitable urgency, affirms he commitment to all life, including human life. If we really care about the lives and prospects of humanity, this requires us to radically re-examine our infinitely interwoven symbiosis with other life on the planet. Only through cultivating emotional bonds with non-human lives as strong as those we have with others, can we begin to articulate the kind of dialectical practices we need to sustainably care not only for the biosphere, but for each other. We will examine her provocative figure of ‘Oddkin’, which opens up realms of understanding and acting in the Thick Present which are radically hybrid, and transindividual.

Natureculture New Materialism - towards a depatriarchized ananthropocentric (post-) humanities - sexism/racism is exacerbated by anthropo-supremacy –> familiarity breeds paradigmatic contempt non-Malthusian/Lovelockian radical solidarity, requires ananthropocentrism

Natureculture New Materialism - towards a depatriarchized ananthropocentric (post-) humanities - sexism/racism is exacerbated by anthropo-supremacy –> familiarity breeds paradigmatic contempt non-Malthusian/Lovelockian radical solidarity, requires ananthropocentrism

Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one? What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance? - Staying with the Trouble p.2

Haraway Multiculturalism is now an insult. A kind of neoliberaliza- tion of the Family of Man. It’s a kind of add-and-stir and mix it all together. It’s what the liberals do when they want to really avoid the trouble of race.At least that’s the accusation. I don’t think it’s entirely fair. Goodeve What do we call it instead now? Haraway Idioms for unity right now are impoverished. Really impover- ished. They all involve oppressions and exclusions, like immediately repudiating “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” That simply repeats the violence of racism. After WWII the UNESCO statements on universal man, which deliberately were meant to address the fascist doctrine of racial difference, relied on the notion of gene frequencies and populations.As we talked about briefly above, the pressure of human numbers weighs on me, in its complex distributions and extreme inequalities of effects and causes. The slogan “Make Kin Not Babies” derives from a standing-room only panel that Adele Clarke and I organized at the 2015 meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science, was followed in 2018 by Making Kin Not Population, with Kim TallBear, Michelle Murphy, Ruha Benjamin, and Chia Ling Wu and her former student,Yu Ling Huang.We are not all in agreement, but we are, in Angela Davis’s idiom, in generative conflict and collaboration in overlapping but non-identical idioms and histories. I wrote about “Universal Man” walking out of the UNESCO building in the chapter on race; that man depended on the discourse of populations rather than races.The European who walks out of the EU building today is deeply indebted to the same liberal discourse of the United Nations’ and of UNESCO’s statements on race.And the right-wing never accommodated either to the European man or the UNESCO man.They were never committed to this version of human unity. The good part of what they’re committed to is place—love of here, not everywhere. Care for here, not everywhere. But this kind of love of place succumbs to frank racism very easily—fear of the stranger, the one thought to be out of place, the alien, the immigrant, the Indigenous. Populationist thinking was supposed to counter that, but could not because of its own unexamined assumptions and practices. My current work continues to probe the necessity of making kin non-biogenetically, making oddkin for multispecies environmental justice. -Modest Witness p. XLVII

reading: interview with Sarah Franklin

Antiracism and the uses of science in the post-World War II: An analysis of UNESCO's first statements on race (1950 and 1951)

Camille Stories, ch. 8 from Staying with the Trouble