
FREE
for Members
Infectious Affinities of Viruses, Plants, and Dying Human Bodies
Monday, January 27, 2020
Roosevelt House, 47-49 E 65th St, New York, NY 100065
Presented By
The Anthropology Section
The New York Academy of Sciences
This presentation charts the emergence of precarious futures by conjuring a space between medical anthropology, multi species ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and zoonosis(exchanges of pathogens between humans and non-humans). Its analytic task is akin to tossing a deck of cards into the air and trying to grasp how different beings would read their novel configuration.
Here the entities unpredictably thrown together include humans, plants,
bats, chickens, and viruses, and the forces that induce unforeseeable rearrangements include state efforts to turn environmental destruction into social justice, alternative indigenous socialisms that grant plants agency in imagining futures, and climate change. By tracing how assemblages of rabies viruses and human nerve cells occasion more-than-human speech acts and plants sensorily move between healers; and patients; bodies, it pushes against boundaries that would isolate species, ontologies, and subdisciplines.
Location: Roosevelt House, 47-49 E 65th St, New York, NY 10065
A dinner and wine reception will precede the talk. Buffet dinner begins at 5:45 PM.
Lectures begin at 6:30 PM and are free and open to the public, but registration is required.