Eben Kirk­sey (CUNY Grad­u­ate Cen­ter): “Inter­species Love in an Age of Excess: Being and Becom­ing With a Com­mon Ant, Ectatomma ruidum (Roger)”

• Feb­ru­ary 16, 2012, 2:00 PM, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions 202

Eben Kirk­sey is a cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist and sci­ence stud­ies scholar at the CUNY Grad­u­ate Cen­ter who stud­ies the polit­i­cal dimen­sions of imag­i­na­tion as well as the inter­play of nat­ural and cul­tural his­tory. As a guest co-editor of Cul­tural Anthro­pol­ogy, Kirk­sey has assem­bled a col­lec­tion of orig­i­nal research arti­cles from the emerg­ing field of mul­ti­species ethnog­ra­phy. His first book, Free­dom in Entan­gled Worlds, is about an indige­nous polit­i­cal move­ment in West Papua, the half of New Guinea under Indone­sian control.

In this talk, Eben explores the Ant, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of empathiz­ing with a species that is com­monly thought of as infe­rior to the human.

This talk is spon­sored by the Depart­ment of Anthro­pol­ogy, the Simp­son Cen­ter for the Human­i­ties, and the South­east Asia Cen­ter in the Jack­son School of Inter­na­tional Studies.