Donna Haraway is a science and technology critic and feminist theorist who emerged in the 1980s and critically examined the power structures of technology and discourse while rethinking relations between humans and nonhumans. Her best-known essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), introduced the cyborg as a metaphor and challenged modern Western binaries such as human/animal, nature/artificial, and body/machine. In Haraway’s work, the cyborg is both a figure associated with real high-tech weaponry and science fiction and a counter-myth to the idea of "man as human." Through this ironic and strategic figure, she suggested the possibility of hybrid subjects that cross race, gender, and species boundaries.
From the 2000s onward, Haraway proposed "companion species" as a new keyword to replace the cyborg. This shift emphasized coexistence between humans, animals, and environments. Using familiar animals such as dogs as examples, she argued that humans are always embedded in co-evolutionary relations of natureculture, a term that expresses the inseparable entanglement of nature and culture. She stressed that humans and nonhumans, both living and nonliving, shape the world through mutual influence. Haraway also kept a critical distance from the term "posthuman," objecting to uses of the concept that celebrate technological enhancement or transcendence of the human body. In Staying with the Trouble (2016), she further deconstructed human-centered narratives through a perspective open to biological and geological time, and advocated coexistence and co-evolution with intimate others. Her thought has influenced media theory, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities.