Biography
Eben Kirksey is an American anthropologist who specializes on science and justice. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, hosted Kirksey for the 2019-2020 academic year, where he finished his latest book: The Mutant Project.
Personal website: https://eben-kirksey.space/
THE MUTANT PROJECT
St. Martin's Press, St. Martin's Publishing Group, On Sale: 11/10/2020.
"A riveting jaunt to the cliff-edge of the future, where scientists, engineers, patients and biohackers struggle over the power, function and meaning of human gene editing...Empathetic, provocative and probing, it is a must read."
--Alondra Nelson, author of The Social Life of DNA
Read more on Eben's profileBiography summary
Eben Kirksey attended the University of Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Duke University Press has published his first two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014).
See Google Scholar for his latest academic publications.
When controversy broke about the world’s first genetically modified babies, Prof. Kirksey spoke about ethics from the main stage of the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. Over 1.8 million people watched news unfold from the Summit in real time, as Dr. Jiankui He revealed the details of his CRISPR experiment. After the dust settled, Eben Kirksey traveled to mainland China where he secured insider access to Dr. He’s laboratory. The Mutant Project chronicles the profit-driven medical enterprises continue to push CRISPR into reproductive clinics.
In academic circles, Prof. Kirksey 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. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” an article co-authored with Stefan Helmreich, has served as a charter for anthropologists and intellectual allies who study other species whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds. Recently, Kirksey has introduced new approaches to chemo-ethnography in collaboration with Nicholas Shapiro.
Within the art world Kirksey has become an established curator. A 2012 cover story of Art Review celebrated his first New York City exhibit: The Multispecies Salon which brought together environmental artists with hackers who are remaking life itself. At Roskilde, the annual European music festival featuring 180 bands and over 130,000 festival-goers, Kirksey collaborated with performance artists to animate insights from his last book, Emergent Ecologies, with a site-specific installation. Princeton University hosted an art exhibit to launch the book, and a Brooklyn warehouse hosted a continuation of the show with over 90 artists his ideas.
Kirksey has delivered scores of invited lectures and keynote presentations at distinguished international institutions including Oxford University, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris), Oxford University, Yale University, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Stanford University.
After witnessing human rights abuses, and writing about them in Freedom in Engangled Worlds, Eben Kirksey became dedicated to social justice. In September 2010 he testified in a Congressional Hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives about massacres in West Papua.
Media appearances
Eben Kirksey is an expert on science and justice.
Journalists from the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Democracy Now, and the BBC, among many other media outlets, have sought him out as an expert.
Projects
"The Promise of Justice," ARC Discovery Project with Sophie Chao (Sydney), Anna Tsing (UC Santa Cruz), and Benny Giay (KINGMI), 2020-2023.
Publications
The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
Scott Kirksey
(2020), New York, N.Y., A1
Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene
E Kirksey
(2019), Vol. 36, pp. 197-219, Theory, Culture and Society, London, Eng., C1
Feeding the flock: Wild cockatoos and their Facebook friends
E Kirksey, Paul Munro, Thom van Dooren, Dan Emery, Anne Maree Kreller, Jeffrey Kwok, Ken Lau, Madeleine Miller, Kaleesha Morris, Stephanie Newson, Erin Olejniczak, Amy Ow, Kate Tuckson, Sarah Sannen, John Martin
(2018), Vol. 1, pp. 602-620, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, London, Eng., C1
Utopia for the golden frog of Panama
Scott Kirksey
(2017), pp. 307-334, Cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world, Cambridge, Mass., B1
Chemo-Ethnography: An Introduction
Nicholas Shapiro, Eben Kirksey
(2017), Vol. 32, pp. 481-493, Cultural Anthropology, Arlington, VA, C1
Chemoethnography: an introduction
Nicholas Shapiro, Scott Kirksey
(2017), Vol. 32, pp. 481-493, Cultural anthropology, Arlington, Va., C1-1
Lively multispecies communities, deadly racial assemblages, and the promise of justice
Scott Kirksey
(2017), Vol. 116, pp. 195-206, South Atlantic quarterly, Durham, N.C., C1
Multispecies families, capitalism and the law
Eben Kirksey
(2016), pp. 155-174, Animals, biopolitics, law : lively legalities, London, Eng., B1
Multispecies studies: cultivating arts of attentiveness
Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, Ursula Münster
(2016), Vol. 8, pp. 1-23, Environmental humanities, Durham, N.C., C1-1
Species: a praxiographic study
E Kirksey
(2015), Vol. 21, pp. 758-780, Journal of the royal anthropological institute, Chichester, Eng., C1
Scott Kirksey
(2015), Vol. 32, pp. 5-7, Antennae: the journal of nature in visual culture, London, Eng., C1
Tactics of multispecies ethnography
Scott Kirksey, Craig Schuetze, Stefan Helmreich
(2014), pp. 1-24, The multispecies salon, Durham, N.C., B1
Scott Kirksey
(2014), pp. 111-111, The Multispecies Salon, Durham, N.C., B1
Interspecies Love: Being and Becoming With a Common Ant, Ectatomma ruidum (Roger)"
Scott Kirksey
(2013), pp. 164-164, Humans and Other Animals: Rethinking the Species Interface (, B1-1
Freedom in Entangled Worlds West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power
Eben Kirksey
(2012), A1-1
THE EMERGENCE OF MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHY
S KIRKSEY, STEFAN HELMREICH
(2010), Vol. 25, pp. 545-576, Cultural Anthropology, C1-1
S Kirksey, Andreas Harsono
(2008), Vol. 16, pp. 165-197, South East Asia Research, C1-1
A Road to Freedom: Mee Articulations and the Trans-Papua Highway
Scott Kirksey, K Van Bilsen
(2002), Vol. 158, pp. 837-854, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 's-Gravenhage, The Netherlands, C1-1
The Wild Terrorist Gang: The Semantics of Violence and Self-determination in West Papua
S Kirksey, J Roemajauw
(2002), Vol. 30, pp. 189-203, Oxford Development Studies, C1-1
Funded Projects at Deakin
Australian Competitive Grants
The Promise of Justice
A/Prof Eben Kirksey, Dr Sophie Chao, Dr Benny Giay
ARC - Discovery Projects
- 2021: $10,348
- 2020: $57,053
Industry and Other Funding
CRISPR: A Hope Technology
A/Prof Eben Kirksey
- 2020: $37,718
- 2019: $37,358
Supervisions
No completed student supervisions to report