THE COMMITTEE ON INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE STUDIES PRESENTS

EBEN KIRKSEY

The Game of Global Futures

November 30^th, 4:15-5:30

Room 5307 | The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Free and open to the public

Part of the Multispecies Salon Wednesday Speaker Series

Unexpected connections can make new things come into being.  New technologies, new economies, new identities and political visions:futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections.  At this participatory event audience members will be asked to imagine future coalescences, to play the Game of Global Futures, an exercise in imaginative story-telling.  Each player will be given a mission. “Create a revolution,” for example.  “Corrupt anation’s government,” or “revitalize an ancient philosophy.”

Departing from the original game, I will invite participants to play the game of global futures with a novel mission and a new figure of hope.  A figural tube, a coupling of diverse machines and infrastructures, is currently vacuuming, storing, transporting, and depositing material wealth in the modern world system. Audience members will be invited to take on a daunting mission: “Take over the tube.”

Eben Kirksey is a cultural anthropologist at the CUNY Graduate Center who studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history. His first book, “Freedom in Entangled Worlds”, is about an indigenous political movement in West Papua, the half of New Guinea under Indonesian control. This book will be published in 2011 by Duke University Press. As a guest co-editor of Cultural Anthropology Eben has assembled a collection of original research articles from the emerging field of multispecies ethnography.