Informatics of Domination

Informatics of Domination

2025

eds. Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee, Duke University Press.

Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; images drawn by hand on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today. This volume includes an afterword by Haraway.

Contributors: Dalida María Benfield, Zach Blas, Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Shu Lea Cheang, Jian Neo Chen, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Dinkins, Ricardo Dominguez, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Matthew Fuller, Jacob Gaboury, Jennifer Gabrys, Alexander R. Galloway, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Stefan Helmreich, Kathy High, Leon J. Hilton, Ho Rui An, Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Tung-Hui Hu, Caroline A. Jones, Melody Jue, Homay King, Larissa Lai, Lawrence Lek, Esther Leslie, Alexis Lothian, Isadora Neves Marques, Radha May (Elisa Giardina-Papa, Nupur Mathur, and Bathsheba Okwenje), Shaka McGlotten, Mahan Moalemi, madison moore, Astrida Neimanis, Bahar Noorizadeh, Luciana Parisi, Thao Phan, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Rita Raley, Patricia Reed, Jennifer Rhee, Bassem Saad, Ashkan Sepahvand, Justin Talplacido Shoulder, Lucy Suchman, Ollie Zhang

“This volume brings together a collection of diverse and original texts from a stunning array of authors who reveal the importance of understanding technodomination from the perspective of feminist and queer engagements with domination. They each start from and engage with one line of Donna J. Haraway’s ‘Informatics of Domination’ chart, updating its content and form while relating it to contemporary developments. Specialists in feminist studies, science and technology studies, and new media studies will all welcome this book and its intellectual adventurousness.” – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, author of Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition

“Linking Donna J. Haraway’s ‘Informatics of Domination’ chart to an array of contemporary bodily, ecological, sociotechnical, and expressive contexts, this collection introduces fresh perspectives and unfurls a variety of feminist, queer, postcolonial, biopolitical, and environmental agendas. Its assemblage of eclectic works deconstruct and question the scientific authority of the diagram/chart as a form and open up critical space, serving as important models of experimental multidisciplinary scholarly intervention.” – Lisa Parks, Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

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