A conversation with Eben Kirksey, award-winning author and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford Empathy is at the heart of human-centred design projects, which aim to put real people and communities at the core of the design process for infrastructures and buildings. The environment, in these projects, is often treated simply as a place for human recreation, aesthetic pleasure, or as a space for enhancing mental and physical health. Expanding the scope of empathy is a central aim of decentred multispecies design. By decentring the design process from the human, the aim is to generate homes and habitat for specific animals, plants, fungi, and microbes in multispecies worlds. Endangered plants and animals may require protective infrastructures and ongoing care to help them survive the Anthropocene. Creating spaces for ethical encounters with endangered forms of life, and teaching people new practices of responsibility, can help foster empathy in an era of extinction. With this talk, Prof Kirksey will take inventory of some past and ongoing projects that are already tacitly working with principles of decentred multispecies design. He will also describe some new collaborative projects that are imagining and designing future landscapes and infrastructures that will contain niches for vulnerable lifeforms and also generate emergent ecological possibilities.
SPEAKER: Eben Kirksey is an award-winning author who is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Broadly speaking, his research and teaching relates to the environment, medical anthropology, continental philosophy, and human rights. To date he has published three books: Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012), Emergent Ecologies (2012), and The Mutant Project (2020). His edited collections—”The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010), The Multispecies Salon (2014), and The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022)—have shaped interdisciplinary conversations about nature and culture. Kirksey is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—an emerging field that considers how people interact with animals, microbes, plants, and fungi.
Wide ranging interests—related to novel ecosystems, biological art, medical ethics, reproductive justice, CRISPR gene editing, and disability—are reflected in his diverse publications. Hope is a recurring theme in his work: not as naive optimism, but as a method for identifying fragile possibilities for life, justice, and peaceful coexistence. Currently he is studying how the human condition has been shaped by symbiotic viruses, biotechnology, chemical exposures, and capitalism.
DISCUSSANT: Lee Davis is an author, designer, and social entrepreneur. He is currently co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Creative Impact at MICA, dedicated to leveraging the power of creativity to tackle social and ecological challenges in Baltimore and beyond. Lee is also co-founder and former co-CEO of NESsT that has invested over $40 million in social enterprises across Latin America and Eastern Europe. For his pioneering work at NESsT, Lee was a 2004 recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and was appointed a Social Enterprise Fellow at the Yale School of Management from 2011-2023. Lee has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London since 2019, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses on “life-centered design,” reimagining design for a more-than-human world.