Eben Kirksey has been studying China's innovation economy since 2017, and has a particular interest in the biotechnology sector of Shenzhen. He is a cultural anthropologist, who uses ethnographic methods to approach the intersection of science and society. His most recent book, The Mutant Project (2020), offers an insider's account of the laboratory of Jiankui He, where the world’s first genetically modified children were created with CRISPR-Cas9.
Eben 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. Lately he has used approaches from multispecies studies and the environmental humanities to understand the impact of a typhoon that hit southern China in 2018. Currently he is conducting research in mainland Southeast Asia to understand how coronaviruses circulate among animals and people.
Eben was a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, before he went on to earn his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has taught at some of the most selective and innovative higher education institutions such as Princeton University, Deep Springs College and New College of Florida, where he was an undergraduate student. In Australia he helped found the Environmental Humanities program at UNSW Sydney, and he maintains ongoing collaborations with colleagues at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
Personal website: https://eben-kirksey.space/
