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Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway was born in Denver, Colorado on September 6th 1944. Her father was a sportswriter for the Denver Post and her mother died when she was a teenager. Haraway was raised in a very religious Catholic home and attended a Catholic school. Once she completed high school she attended the college at the Colorado College for a degree in zoology. Once she had completed college she went to study in Paris where she learned more about evolutionary philosophy and theology. -
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University of Hawaii to First Professor in the Feminist Theory
Haraway taught women’s studies and the history of science at the University of Hawaii from 1971-1974.
She then transferred to Johns Hopkins University in 1974, where she stayed and taught women’s studies and history of science till 1980. In 1980, Haraway moved to California, where she worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Here, Haraway became the first tenured professor in the feminist theory within the United States. -
Yale
Haraway decided to pursue her Ph.D. in biology at Yale. In 1972, while attending Yale, Haraway wrote The Search for Organizing Relations: An Organismic Paradigm in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology. This dissertation spoke about the use of metaphors in shaping experiments within experimental biology. This dissertation was later published in a book Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology. -
“A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s”
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“Situated Knowledges”
In 1988, Haraway wrote a thesis paper over “situated knowledges” called, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question to Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In this thesis Haraway tries to “expose” the myth of scientific objectivity and she defined “situated knowledges” as understanding that all knowledge comes from a positional perspective. This “allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.” -
Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science
In 1990, Haraway wrote Primate Visions. In this she took a turn from the cyborg theory and set a focus within biology. Like her essay she wrote in Yale, Haraway once again focuses on metaphors and narratives, only this time, ones that direct the science of primatologist. Utilizing examples of Western narratives of gender, race and class, Haraway questioned some of the most fundamental constructions of humans based on primates. -
Present
Donna Haraway is still living and well at the wonderful age of 78. She resides in California and is an American Professor Emerita within the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California. Throughout her lifetime she has contributed to the feminist theory and became a leading scholar within contemporary eco feminism.