introduction situates
Modest_Witness and clarifies Haraway's incisive and sorely needed conceptual universe." -Adele E. Clarke, University of California, San Francisco, USA
"From one of our most visionary contemporary thinkers, here is your guide to the New World Order of Technoscience. In this timely re-issue of Haraway's intensely interesting, incisive, and inspiring exploration of what happens to life and living when technology becomes the beating heart of science, we learn how to ask the urgent questions. As genes and chips implode modernity's defining distinctions-between nature and culture, science and society, technology and politics-what will guide and ground our ability to collectively think and live together? When a rodent can be both intellectual property and a model for breast cancer, who lives and dies and how, and what kin shall we keep? Who is the 'we'-the collective-that will live these lives, and die these deaths? Haraway's is a plea for a less-literal minded and more imaginative understanding of what is at stake in these powerful world making practices of modern biology. The task is critical. In a time when the bits and bytes of our bodies-our blood, tissue and DNA-are the site of massive worldly transformations, Haraway powerfully argues for the urgency of a civic biology, a biology which capacitates us to ask the formative questions."--Jenny Reardon, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
