Bio: (1944-) American biologist, philosopher, cyberneticist, and sociologist. Donna Haraway holds a Ph.D. in biology from Yale University and has taught at the University of Hawaii, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haraway is best known for her "cyborg" concept. For her, the cyborg is a hybrid of a machine and an organism, an idea that lies between reality and fantasy. She uses the concept of the cyborg to study the impact of technology in various social spheres, for example, sex and sports. She believes that by studying people's attitudes towards technology, on the one hand, and towards animals, especially domestic animals, and primates, on the other hand, we can learn a lot about scientific epistemology, gender relations, and racial categories.

Scientists began to study primates in order to better understand our species, and they were especially interested in how much our society is determined by our innate (primate) nature, and how much by culture. Primatology, but also the whole of science, is not able to get rid of the prejudices that people have about culture, nature, and gender. Science is not able to build unique knowledge that is not conditioned by social institutions, relationships, and values. In addition, science has most often served to justify and strengthen existing social hierarchies. That is why Haraway advocates situational knowledge and gives priority to different perspectives that arise within different communities. Science should be the product of a specific context and a specific moment. The author also criticizes standard science for its constant need to introduce dichotomies, such as culture/nature, male/female, man/animal, and man/machine. Haraway thus joins other postmodern epistemologists who advocated the multiplicity of perspectives and the criticized futility of building a completely "objective science".

In her later works, Haraway pays a lot of attention to domestic animals, especially dogs. She believes that humans and dogs have co-evolved and that both species have adapted to each other. On the example of dividing dogs by race, she draws a parallel with the scientific categories of human races and concludes that both attempts to divide species by race are the result of the same social expectations and neglect of many biological differences and similarities within and between races.

Haraway also made a very significant contribution to gender studies. She believes that cultural prejudices around gender have had a key impact on the creation of scientific knowledge. Sexist prejudices have contributed to the misrepresentation of female physiology and psychology. In addition, these prejudices led to the creation of reductionist theories instead of holistic gender theories.

Main works

A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985);

Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989);

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature: (Essays from 1978–89) (1991);

Modest_Witness @Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (1997);

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003); Manifestly Haraway (2017);

Making Kin not Population (2018).