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Eben Kirksey: Viruses Make Us Think

Datum
03. Okto­ber 2025 

Online Lec­ture


Eben Kirk­sey: „Virus­es Make Us Think”

Fri­day, Octo­ber 3, 2025, 12:00 – 1:30 pm (Pacif­ic Time)

Crea­tures through­out the ani­mal kingdom—from mice, to insects, to humans—use viral par­ti­cles in their brains to trans­mit infor­ma­tion among nerve cells. Viral infec­tions are inte­gral in long-term mem­o­ry for­ma­tion. Over half of the human genome is viral in ori­gin, and biol­o­gists are just start­ing to under­stand how ancient infec­tions have shaped the human con­di­tion. Before the role of virus­es in mem­o­ry for­ma­tion was under­stood, Don­na Har­away mar­veled at a “coor­di­nat­ed sym­pho­ny” of human cells and microbes which work togeth­er to “make the con­scious me pos­si­ble.” Build­ing on Haraway’s provoca­tive claim “we have nev­er been human,” I sug­gest: “we have always been viral.” This talk will con­sid­er a num­ber of inter­re­lat­ed ques­tions: Can virus­es think? Are they even alive? Is human con­scious­ness a hybrid mul­ti­species coproduction?

Eben Kirk­sey is 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. Eben is per­haps best known for his work in mul­ti­species ethnog­ra­phy. Duke Uni­ver­si­ty Press pub­lished his first two books–Freedom in Entan­gled Worlds (2012) and Emer­gent Ecolo­gies (2015)–as well as two edit­ed col­lec­tions The Mul­ti­species Salon (2014) and The Promise of Mul­ti­species Jus­tice (2022). St. Martin’s Press pub­lished The Mutant Project (2020), a book that fol­lows some of the world’s first genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied people.

More details and links to Eben’s pub­li­ca­tions are on-line: https://eben-kirksey.space/

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