Why respond to Haraway’s (2016) ‘Staying with the Trouble’?
Shared by MIRIAM POTTS
Why respond to Haraway’s (2016) ‘Staying with the Trouble’?This week we rewrite the Arcadian myth of Pan:
The hybrid figure Pan steals the magic lyre from his father, Hermes. Pan then gives the lyre to Chrysogaster who uses it to translate her stories into other birds’ languages, thus preserving them beyond her species’ impending extinction.
Haraway (2016, p. 55) writes, ‘the Chthulucene is made up of multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with … in precarious times’. In our microblogs, we (3 hyperlinks) are drawn into the ethical response-ability of Staying with the Trouble. In this time of ‘mass extinctions’, we must imagine possible futures for ‘multispecies flourishing’ (Haraway 2016). Creating new stories is essential to earthly survival in urgent times.
Addenda
As we write, Chrysogaster’s summer home in Tasmania is threatened by bushfires. Confronted by her species’ impending death, we attend imaginatively, a strategy exemplified by children and learnt by attending to their relations with animals (Taylor 2018).
This microblog is the fourth in a conversation between Miriam Potts and Rebecca Ream.
Image: Miriam Potts (2019). Hermes’ magic lyre. Digital collage from watercolour and photograph.
References
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Potts, M. (2019). Can we imagine alternative ways of keeping threatened species’ knowledge? CommonWorlds microblog post.
Ream, R. (2019). What if the Children of Compost had Arcadian Roots? CommonWorlds microblog post.
Ream, R. (2019). Could Pan be written as a cultural map for Haraway’s sympoietic response-ability? CommonWorlds microblog post.
Taylor, A. (2018, September 1). Learning with wild rabbits: Troubling the divides of settler colonialism. Paper presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference, Sydney.