Whidden Lectures presents Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway, a history professor from the University of California at Santa Cruz will deliver this week's Whidden Lectures at McMaster University.
The first lecture, “We Have Never Been Human: Companion Species in Nature Cultures,” takes place Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Ewart Angus Centre in Health Science Centre. It will examine how to think jointly through biology, poststructuralist philosophy and science studies. Haraway will flesh out what she means by “companion species in naturecultures” as a way to inhabit multi-species worlds without the pitched battles between modernist humanism and its posts.
The second lecture, “We Have Never Been Human: Encounters in Dogland”, will be held Wednesday, at 4 p.m. in the Council Chambers in Gilmour Hall, Rm.111. This lecture adopts the perspective developed in the first lecture to explore activism, competitive sports, and pet cultures in contemporary capitalist worlds.
Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches feminist theory, science studies, and animal studies. She has earned her Ph.D. in Biology at Yale in 1972 and has taught biology at the University of Hawaii and the history of science at The John Hopkins University.
Her current research explores the ties between human beings and other animals. She is at work on Notes of a Sports Writer's Daughter, a popular book about the people and dogs who play the sport of agility, and When Species Meet: Encounters in Dogland. This book examines health and genetics practices; competitive sports; relations between commodity value and other kinds of value; training practices; questions about love and violence; and needed conversations between behavioral and evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and philosophers about the relationships between human beings and dogs in contemporary culture.
The Whidden Lectures were established in 1954 by E. Carey Fox, a philanthropic alumnus of McMaster University, to honour a beloved chancellor, Rev. Howard P. Whidden, churchman, statesman and teacher, who had been the architect of the Universiy's transfer from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930. The first lecture in the annual series was delivered in 1956.
