As a part of the programme during the group exhibition A New We, we invite you to a lecture and discussion on tactics for living in a multispecies world by Dr. Eben Kirksey. Dr. Kirksey will join us from a live video connection. The lecture will be in English.
Dr. Kirksey is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that mixes ethnographic, historical, ethological, and genetic methods to study spaces where humans and other species meet.
Dr. Kirksey first entered this field as an editor and curator. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography, a special issue of Cultural Anthropology co-edited with Stefan Helmreich, situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Collaborations with bioartists, who work with living matter as their media, produced The Multispecies Salon: Gleanings from a Para-Site (2014), an art exhibit and edited book which brought together insights from the humanities on the microbiome, health, food, environmental justice, and synthetic biology.
Eben Kirksey is a permanent faculty member in Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and a Visiting Research Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Princeton University hosted Dr. Kirksey as the 2015-2016 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor. He has published two books with Duke University Press— Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as the edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014).