The Promise of Multispecies Justice
Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminars
The Promise of Multispecies Justice
This event is part of the Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminar Series.
Speaker: Eben Kirksey (University of Oxford)
Tuesday 30 May 2023, 12:30pm - 1:30pm
All are welcome. No registration is required.
What are the possibilities for multispecies justice? How do social justice struggles intersect with the lives of animals, plants, and other creatures? This talk will draw on work by leading thinkers in anthropology, geography, philosophy, speculative fiction, poetry, and contemporary art answer these questions from diverse grounded locations. In America Indigenous peoples and prisoners are decolonizing multispecies relations in unceded territory and carceral landscapes. Small justices are emerging in Tanzanian markets, near banana plantations in the Philippines, and in abandoned buildings of Azerbaijan as people navigate relations with feral dogs, weeds, rats, and pesticides. Conflicts over rights of nature are intensifying in Colombia’s Amazon. Specters of justice are emerging in India, while children in Micronesia memorialize extinct bird species. Engaging with ideas about environmental justice, restorative justice, and other species of justice, this talk will consider the possibility of flourishing in multispecies worlds, present and to come.
Biography:
Eben Kirksey s a cultural anthropologist who is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Questions related to science and social justice animate his most recent book, The Mutant Project (2020), which offers an insiders account of the laboratory in China that created the world’s first children whose genes were edited with CRISPR-Cas9.
Eben was a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, before he went on to earn his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has taught at some of the most selective and innovative higher education institutions like Princeton University and Deep Springs College. In Australia he helped found the Environmental Humanities program at UNSW Sydney, and he maintains ongoing collaborations with colleagues at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia Personal website: https://eben-kirksey.space
All are welcome.
For more details about the Lunchtime Seminars please follow the link.
As always, if anyone would like to offer a lunchtime talk, film, reading, musical performance, conference proposal, or anything else relevant to the environmental humanities, please email envhums@torch.ox.ac.uk or fiona.stafford@some.ox.ac.uk. We would also welcome expressions of interest from potential DPhil students planning to work on Environmental Humanities topics.
