Haraway Bookshelf
Carrier Bag
Monthly Reading Circle
[general information below]

FREE online sessions
Every last sunday of the month: 14:00-16:00

Throughout the year-long program more information is being added to the Haraway Bookshelf on the Harawiki. You can find information on all previous and upcoming sessions here: Harawiki/doku


Carrier Bag #1
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Ergo-Feminism I: More Work for Mother - Ruth Schwarz
Technological advance has always been accompanied with utopian promises for the emancipation of humanity from drudgery. Ruth Schwarz shows that though the demands on women have transformed through recent history, they by no means have become fewer or less arduous. Carrier Bag #2
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Ergo-feminism II - Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici’s key contribution to Marx’s critique of political economy is to introduce the concept of reproductive labour, meaning all the (usually unpaid) labour which is required to reproduce the capacity of the worker to work. This includes domestic labour in the home, including care work, responsibility for the bulk of which conventionally falls on women. Carrier Bag #3
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Ergo-feminism III - The Captive Maternal - Joy James
Joy James examines the maternal strategies to protect and support their children under conditions of extreme oppression where there are few prospects for success, emancipation, or even survival. Carrier Bag #4
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Synthesis I: Xenogenesis - Octavia Butler
On the edge of being human, when human being is barely bearable, Octavia Butler’s science fiction allows her to encounter the persistence of racism, colonialism and patriarchy in a highly technologized world with uncommon intimacy and emotional power. Carrier Bag #
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Dialectical Ecology I: Health - Stacy Alaimo
Modern human life is entangled with and interpenetrated by technologies. Stacy Alaimo examines this new hybrid experience in all its complexity, especially with regard to medicine and new notions of health and disability. Carrier Bag #6
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Dialectical Ecology II: The Value of Nature - Stefania Barca
Stefania Barca’s proposal to integrate the “Work of Nature” into the Theory of Value as argued by Marx, is profound and ambitious. Her analysis grapples intensively with the concerns of Federici, Haraway and Vivero de Castro and provides bracing new syntheses Carrier Bag #7
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Dialectical Ecology III: Biosocialism - Donna Haraway
From the Manifesto for Cyborgs to “Staying with the Trouble” Donna Haraway has expanded her explicitly socialist commitments to include all of life. Informed by Margulis’ symbiogenesis theory, Haraway attempts to trace out what a new (post-) humanist / humusimt politics might mean. Carrier Bag #8
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Synthesis II: The Destruction of Reason - Gyorgy Lukacs
Rosa Luxemburgs warned that modernity will either progress to socialism or collapse into barbarism, is often repeated today. But what happens when elements of the struggle for socialism are reappropriated for Fascism. In “the Destruction of Reason”, Gyorgy Lukacs discusses how many of the insights of Marxism, denatured of their revolutionary commitment become weapons for reaction. In the face of the deligitimisation of reason and a romantic return to mysticism and belief, he affirms a critical commitment to reason. Carrier Bag #9
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Parapolitics I: Teaching to Transgress - bell hooks
bell hooks is known as a poet, but some of her most important work is in rethinking education for a rapidly changing world, where social conventions are being radically disrupted. Over her long academic career, hooks developed a practice she called “engaged pedagogy” which allows students to help each other meaningfully integrate critiques of class, race and sexuality into their studies. Carrier Bag #10
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Parapolitics II: Sojourn for Justice - Claudia Jones
Journalist and activist, Claudia Jones argued that the emancipation of Black women required attending to how they were synergistically “triply oppressed”, economically, racially and sexually, so that any emancipatory struggle could not be directed only to one facet but must simultaneously attend to all three oppressions and their interplay to succeed. This became one of the foundational theories which became known as intersectionality. Carrier Bag #11
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Parapolitics III: New Institutionialities - Jane Addams
Jane Addams was a philosopher, political reformer and pioneer of social work. Addams was know for her utopian “Hull House”, a place which provided unprecedented opportunities for social interaction among citizens of various classes and backgrounds. Hull House challenged standardised education and developed innovative methods to help participants develop independent critical thinking and expression. Carrier Bag #12
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Synthesis III: Re-enchantment of Humanism - Sylvia Wynter
Sylvia Wynter radically rethinks humanism, decrying what she calls bourgeois mono-humanism and decolonizing it with Fanon to produce a dynamic humanism re-enchanted with its own always renegotiated contingency. Deeply concerned with technological and scientific advance, Wynter confronts the specialising and standardizing tendency of homo oeconomicus with the story-telling and meaning-making homo narrans.




Haraway Bookshelf

In our series of monthly meetings for 2022, we extend from our year-long series dedicated to the writing and thought of Donna Haraway ‘Thick Present: Donna Haraway and the Arts’ with a programme of monthly reading circles, engaging deeply with the trouble of our contemporary condition and testing out new methods for synthesis and action. Specifically we will as with the foregoing series, we will explore historical and contemporary understandings of humanity, nature, non-humanity and technology. We will read aloud together from pertinent texts, summon, express and engage with our responses together. Finally we will explore the power of art and fiction to help us provisionally synthesize some of what we are learning into new narratives which fortify and nurture our work.

Historian Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag theory of evolution proposes a radical critique of how we are taught to understand history. A counterpart to heroic narratives of linearity, conquest and progress bound to technologies such as swords, chisels and laser beams, the carrier bag emphasises the fundamental importance of carriage, containing and sheltering. Ursula Le Guin made the concept famous in her short 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ in which she dedicated herself to develop Fisher’s non-heroic narratology in the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s desire to reinvent language “according to a new plan”.

In our new series of monthly meetings for 2022, we extend from our year-long series dedicated to the writing and thought of Donna Haraway ‘Thick Present: Donna Haraway and the Arts’ with a programme of monthly reading circles, engaging deeply with the trouble of our contemporary condition and testing out new methods for synthesis and action. As with the foregoing series, we will explore historical and contemporary understandings of humanity, nature, non-humanity and technology. We will read aloud together from pertinent texts, summon, express and engage with our responses together. Finally we will explore the power of art and fiction to help us provisionally synthesize some of what we are learning into new narratives which fortify and nurture our work.

Here the Carrier Bag Theory encounters what Sylvia Wynter calls the 3rd event of existence, the fact, presence and practices of language which reveals that human being is not a noun but a verb, a praxis. Central to this praxis of being human is storytelling. In Wynter’s critique, all language acts are story telling which provisionally constitute society. Wynter provides a new name for this human being, which has no hegemony over other existence and, being praxis is radically contingent, emergent and heterogenous: homo narrans. Homo narrans, the story-telling being which always requires and implies the social context of telling, listening and responding, provides a carrier bag for the concepts and practices we will examine together in this series.

The online sessions are convened by Baruch Gottlieb and will be held on the last Sunday of each month. The reading circle is open to anyone regardless of previous experience. Main language of discussion will be English. Texts will be provided online to participants a week before the events.