The Multispecies Salon
A Special Event in conjunction with the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association

Saturday, November 18 / 2:15-4:45 PM
Part I: Oakes Mural Room / Part II: Oakes Learning Center

THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY is an age of mass extinction and global war. When human and non-human worlds unexpectedly collide—when red tides wreak havoc on marine fisheries, when “invasive species” remake protected ecosystems—new regimes of techno-scientific management have at tempted to restore predictable balances. This interactive forum will depart from sites of managed conflict to explore locations of biocultural hope. We envision new approaches to “biological anthropology,” approaches that position the writing of natural history within multiple cultural locations. The first part of the Multispecies Salon will be a roundtable workshop. We solicit an audience of provocateurs who will respond to the papers of the AAA Presidential Session titled “Speaking With/For Nature.” The papers—by Kimberly Tallbear (Native American DNA), Paige West (Tree Kangaroo Conservation), S. Eben Kirksey (Foam Frogs and Ecotractors), and Stefan Helmreich (How the Ocean Got Its Genome)—trace how discoveries about nature are being used to transform human social systems and cultured landscapes. Following Susan Leigh Star, we are interested in who lives and dies in the force fields generated by human/non-human mingling. The second half of the Multispecies Salon will consist of a series of short playful interventions. Presenters will imagine new alliances between human and non-human agents, and future biopolitical worlds. Following a screening of clips from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, Susan Harding will lead a discussion of environmental evangelism in the age of high capitalism. Astrid Schrader will provoke us to think about the political implications of dinoflagellate ontology. Bears and salmon will interact in a joint presentation by Heather Swanson and Jacob Metcalf. Eduardo Kohn will talk of dogs and dreams. Canine companions will also appear in shorts read from Donna Haraway’s new work in progress, “Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter.”

For more information, please visit the website at: http://www.skyhighway.com/~multispecies_salon.

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster

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