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 Field Guide
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