392) Eben Kirksey: Boundless entanglements with the virosphere

“I like thinking with viruses because they’re constantly infecting us, changing our nature. Some of them are even changing our genome. We’re constantly in relation with the world around us even though we can barely perceive and understand all of this complexity.”

In this episode, we are joined by anthropologist Eben Kirksey, who invites us to think and feel through a new wave of viral theory through a lens of multi-species entanglement. Through his insatiable curiosity about nature-culture, Eben humbly approaches the viral world as one that reflects the limitations of fixed or reductive categorization. Ultimately, he leaves us with an invitation to explore how radically re-thinking viral systems can offer alternative ways of approaching contemporary socio-political predicaments. He asks: how can we sit with the complexities of symbiotic assemblages amongst species, and what novel relationships are imperative to uplift in an age of extinction?

About the guest:

Eben Kirksey is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford where he teaches Medical Anthropology and Human Ecology. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and helped found one of the world's first Environmental Humanities programs at UNSW Sydney in Australia. Investigating some of the most important stories of our time—related to biotechnology, the environment, and social justice—led him to Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. His books include Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)–plus The Multispecies Salon (2014), and The Mutant Project (2020), a book that follows some of the world’s first genetically modified people.

(The musical offering featured in this episode Lose My Mind by RVBY MY DEAR. The episode-inspired artwork is by Luci Pina.)

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