Making Connections in Troubled Times: Crafting Family in the Chthulucene

Amazon customer: Very nice Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Spain on Nov 11, 2022

Ricardo Lomnitz: It is a beautiful edition of an urgent book by one of the most important philosophers of our time. For all the Haraway admirers, this is a must for their libraries. I greatly recommend its acquisition.

Mexico on Jan 26, 2021

An interested party: Strongly recommended read.
The title says it all. Staying with the trouble is a brilliant alternative to the prevailing ideas of wiping the slate clean and starting fresh. Departing from the arrogant assumption that we will "get it perfect this time round" we learn to "make with", to build rich futures without destroying presents or pasts.
Just reading this book with change your mind. Its language, of simple ideas like "futures" will spur new ways of thinking.
Read it!

Germany on Nov 03, 2019

Paul: It's SF, great for studying connections, lots of great practices discussed , from amazing contributors.

I love Harraway's use of language, and the images she creates, her descriptive methods of discernment and the way she makes links, and explains worlds, that implicates you, has put this at the top of my favourite artist books.

If you are an ecologist an environmentalist, artist or poet, designer, fan of sci-fi, pigeons, the moon, or live on planet Earth, this could be essential reading, which could shift your point of view.

United Kingdom on Jul 18, 2019

Jeremy Hanes: Donna Haraway's work has always fascinated me, and this recent piece on how we can find new ways to encounter and live, grow, and die with other "peoples" (in the broadest sense of the term) is just as vital to my thinking today as Simians, Cyborgs, and Women was at the start of my academic career. Haraway's goal- to find ways of "making oddkin," refusing to take a technological, lazy optimist view of the future nor subscribe to nihilist futilism at what has already occurred, suggests we find ways to reach out in all the myriad creative, intersectional approaches we can muster.

The first half of the book is very dense, where Haraway lays out how she intends to connect her SF practices with attention to other "critters" in the world as the Sixth Great Extinction is already steam-rolling species diversity, habitats, and affecting marginalized, indigenous, and impoverished peoples most. Her idea that we need a new term for this epochal shift- rather than Anthropocene or Capitalocene- instead goes back to "chthonic" others- spiders, pigeons, fungi, and other creatures usually relegated to the compost bins of human attention. She turns instead away from...

United States on Mar 14, 2018

Sardis Siren: Haraway is such a deep original thinker and this offerring is her latest foray into our modern consciousness is classic. The counter intuitive nature of "staying with the trouble" and "making kin not babies" are illustrations of the nature of her unorthadox logic. Her cats cradle logic takes us out of the formal logic rationality that prevails in the west into a realm that is, as usual for her, brings us into interspecies and geologic time frames together to provide us with a field big enough to permit wide ranging conscious potentials to play with in which to watch for emergent potentials. She delights me with her twists and turns dipping into the ancient and bringing into modern light such as her string figure theme...its not only a stimulating read but a serious work that should provoke new ways to see western rationality for the imperialistic hegemonic device it is and provides new ways of consciousness that permits survival in the TROUBLE of today.

Canada on Jul 18, 2017

R. MAY: Haraway puts her unique blend of virtuosic wordplay and broad humanistic and scientific understanding into the service of helping us think about the contemporary state of the world in constructive ways. This is about not dismissing climate change and other huge threats because we can do nothing about them, and also not imagining we have the power to "fix" them, but embracing this moment because it is all that we have, and life is worth it. The constant repetitions of certain phrases and images can be irritating, until you see this as a sort of poem or performance piece that is trying to keep you in the present moment while connecting you to ideas, people, places, and especially species you had never felt kinship to before.

United States on Mar 26, 2017

april: This is a rarity--a book that clear-sightedly addresses the troublesome issue of climate change and general environmental degradation, yet is not relentlessly depressing. Haraway plays with words and ideas, producing a mind-bending work that pushes the reader off center. ONLY by breaking out of our current paradigm, invisible in its ubiquity, can we move forward. A wordsmith, the author does spend a lot of time on terminology, and a bit egotistically champions her own phrases, but the journey she offers is well worth the pedantry. It matter what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what words express ideas.

United States on Feb 19, 2017

N. Serrano: I wouldn't take this on as a blind buy, but if you know of and area a fan of Haraway's work, her latest book is rich with near-end-of-career, all out academic goodness.

United States on Jan 23, 2017

Tracy Sorensen: Climate change and the onset of the Anthropocene, or Cthulucene as Haraway prefers to call it, calls for new ways of being and different stories to the ones we've been telling each other. Rather than an individualistic, capital M Man story, we need earthier, more entangled stories that will guide us in tough decisions about who lives and who dies, for whom we are and are not responsible in a finite world. This is a book about avoiding two mental places that are not helpful: denial on one hand or "game over" on the other. Instead, we need to stay with this trouble, and Haraway provides a lively philosophy for doing that.

United States on Dec 17, 2016