Eben Kirksey on Multispecies Pedagogy
Lecture
04.07.2016 10:00 – 12:00
Location: DasKloHäuschen, Thalkirchner Str. 81, Rachel Carson Center
A novel approach to writing culture, multispecies ethnography, has come of age. Plants, animals, fungi and microbes are appearing alongside people in accounts of natural and cultural history. This talk by Eben Kirksey will explore different approaches to teaching multispecies ethnography. Building on earlier approaches to multi-sited ethnography, anthropologists are starting to "follow the species" or "follow the organism" through human built infrastructures, databases, fragmented landscapes, and global mediascapes. Collaborations with biological scientists, artists, and other critical friends have enabled students to add novel techniques to the ethnographic tool-kit. The emergent generation of multispecies ethnographers are following Timothy Ingold to study what life was and is like at particular times and places, while joining interlocutors in their speculations about what life might or could become.
This talk is organised by the Environmental Studies Certificate Program. It is open to everyone interested in attending.
Eben Kirksey attained his PhD in the History of Consciousness and Cultural Anthropology and is currently working in the department of Anthropology at Princton University.