Staying With the Trouble
Introduced in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this is perhaps Haraway's most important conceptual contribution to the resources available for navigating the present. It is not a middle path between optimism and pessimism. It is the active, ongoing, demanding practice of remaining inside a trouble that does not resolve — refusing the narrative satisfactions of either utopia or apocalypse in favor of the harder work of attention. In the AI context, staying with the trouble is the alternative to both the triumphalist narrative of ascension and the elegiac narrative of loss. It is the posture of the silent middle given philosophical form.
In The You On AI Encyclopedia
The phrase emerged from Haraway's long engagement with the work of Marilyn Strathern and other ethnographers who had taught her that anthropology's strongest insights come not from resolving the strangeness of other cultures but from remaining present to it. Applied to the Anthropocene and to the multispecies crisis of extinction, climate change, and ecological collapse, the practice became a deliberate refusal of the twin seductions of techno-utopian salvation and apocalyptic despair.
The practice has specific features. It requires attention — the slow, disciplined work of noticing what the situation actually is rather than what the dominant narratives say it is. It requires kinship — the active building of relationships across difference that do not resolve into sameness. It requires speculative fabulation — the willingness to tell stories about possible futures without committing to any single story as the truth. And it requires endurance — the recognition that the trouble is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited.
The framework provides a direct alternative to the architecture of You On AI. Segal's book is organized around the image of a tower: the reader climbs five floors and arrives at a view, at a sunrise, at clarity. The metaphor is one of ascension to a position from which the whole landscape becomes visible. Haraway's staying with the trouble refuses this ascension. There is no view from the top. There is only the level of the current, the situated practice of building within conditions that do not resolve.
Segal's own beaver metaphor, as Donna Haraway on AI argues, is actually closer to Haraway's framework than his tower metaphor. The beaver is always in the water, always at the level of the current, always building from within the trouble rather than above it. The beaver's dam does not stop the river. It creates conditions within the river's flow — conditions that are always vulnerable, always in need of maintenance, always partial. This is the Harawayan practice translated into Segal's own vocabulary.
Origin
Haraway developed the concept across multiple essays in the 2010s before bringing it together in the 2016 book of the same title, published by Duke University Press. The book also introduced the Chthulucene as a preferred name for the current era — an era of tentacular entanglements rather than of the human or of capital.
Key Ideas
Not resolution. The practice refuses both the narrative of triumph and the narrative of catastrophe.
Active, not passive. Staying with the trouble requires sustained effort — attention, kinship, speculation, endurance.
Situated, not transcendent. The practice is conducted from inside the situation, at the level of the current, without the fantasy of a view from above.
Plural, not solitary. Troubles are stayed with in company, through the building of kin relationships across difference.
Ongoing, not terminal. The practice never finishes. It is a way of being, not a problem to be solved.
Further Reading
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016)
- Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton, 2015)
- Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times (Open Humanities Press, 2015)
- Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Rowman & Littlefield, 1991)