Haraway, Donna J. 2008a. “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 157–187. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1st ed. New York, NY: Grove Press. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. We will not “beat” climate change, nor is “nature” our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything — plants, animals, humans — are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves “become part of the killer story,” writes Le Guin, “we may get finished along with it.” All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story.The students who signed up were asked to find 3 objects which were somehow related to their research or to the experience of doing their doctorate, put them in a bag and bring them to the online pop-up session. These objects could be linked in practical ways (eg a coffee cup used every day), academically (a favourite book) or for more esoteric reasons related to reflections, memories, dreams, conversations or experiences that were meaningful to them even if tangential to the actual business of writing a doctorate. I came here after reading this one quote below and I am still trying to process the essay. Authors really give us strange, unusual perspectives which once we read seem so obvious. This essay is the kind that needs to be read again and again and would probably keep adding meaning to itself and for me as time passes. She explains that in perpetuating the tradition of telling stories in a linear way we miss out so much ‘stuff’, parts of the story that don’t fit the ordained narrative perhaps or aspects of ourselves or experiences that aren’t seen as relevant to the story we are writing.

Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, International Library of Sociology. New York, NY: Routledge. Ursula K. Le Guin was a celebrated and beloved author of science-fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children's books. Her ground-breaking works, including the Earthsea Trilogy and the Left Hand of Darkness, were enormously influential and drew on cultural anthropology, feminism and Taoism among other themes. Bailey, John. 1991. The Search for Signs of Inteligent Life in the Universe. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Classics.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

yeah sure i'll put this on my goodreads. why not. anything to encourage people to read it; it's like five minutes long and it's a very thoughtful examination of narrative, specifically the way narrative is shaped by a patriarchal drive toward conflict, violence, and war as the centerpoints of human existence. Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. Wagner, Jane. 1986. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. 1st ed. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122.Haraway, Donna J. 1997. “enlightenment@science_wars.com: A Personal Reflection on Love and War.” Social Text 15(1): 123–129. doi: 10.2307/466820. I wanted to find a way to help doctoral students tap into the creativity and uniqueness they bring to their research and I found a short book by the novelist Ursula Le Guin in which she presents her ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (2019) as a fresh and potentially useful way of thinking about doctoral writing. The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…” Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.