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Donna Haraway woke up in California on Oct. 4 to a deluge of emails from her friends. Nine hours behind Vatican City, where Pope Francis' new apostolic exhortation had been released at noon that day, Haraway learned she'd been cited in a footnote of Laudate Deum.
"God has united us to all his creatures. Nonetheless, the technocratic paradigm can isolate us from the world that surrounds us and deceive us by making us forget that the entire world is a 'contact zone,' "wrote Francis, citing Haraway's work about multispe-cies unity.
"Some baby Jesuit who's into animal studies and science studies and feminist theory for some weird reason has been reading me,"Haraway told EarthBeat, alluding to presumed ghost writers behind the apostolic exhortation.
Haraway is a distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with connections to its departments of feminist studies, anthropology, environmental studies and history of consciousness.
She is best known for her work that explores humanity's relationship with animals and machines - like "A Cyborg Manifesto"from 1985.
The phrase cited by Francis is from a chapter in Haraway's 2008 book When Species Meet that explores Haraway's experience training her dog, Cayenne, in agility, a sport where a dog and a human handler navigate an obstacle course.
In the chapter, Haraway elaborates on Mary Louise Pratt's term, "contact zones,"where Pratt wrote that "cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths."
"Contact zones are fraught with danger, with the practices of encounter and conquest, but they are also places of possibility, places where peace might be made,"Haraway told...