As part of the Halfway to the Future Symposium, the University of California Santa Cruz will be live streaming (and recording) a conversation between Donna Haraway and Fred Turner taking place on the evening of Monday October 21, 2024, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., with local audience Q and A to follow. 

Donna Haraway is a professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies and antiracist multispecies studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a contributor to contemporary ecological feminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, emphasizes the distributed co-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking ethical practices.

Fred Turner is a cultural historian who focuses on how new media technologies have changed American life since World War II. He is the author of a number of books, including From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism and most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. 

HttF is honored to host this ‘fireside chat’ style conversation–Haraway’s work has had a powerful influence on many thinkers in the Human Computer Interaction and Design fields, and resonates with key themes to be taken up at the event, which include more-than-humanness, plurality of humanness, ways of knowing, and reflective practices with artificial intelligence (AI). We are delighted that Fred Turner has agreed to engage Haraway in conversation–Turner’s early work reflecting on the rise of cyberculture in the midst of regional counterculture action resonates with HttF’s situating our discussion of the past/present/future of HCI/design work here in Santa Cruz, another longstanding nexus of countercultural thought. 

Donna and Fred will begin with a few initial remarks, and then Fred will engage Donna in an extended conversation tracing the development of her thought and work from her early engagements with feminist technoculture to her most recent work on inter-species socialites.