Keynote: Time traveling with Gregor Samsa, or what you can do with six legs

The parable of Gregor Samsa’s sudden transformation from an average man to a monstrous vermin is a larger-than-life, grim version of the everyday changes we all experience moving through life. This lecture muses about other possible lives navigated, futures imagined, communities entered, environments created, and flourishing cultivated.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University. RGT is a senior advisor and fellow at the Hastings Center, where she is also chief project advisor for “The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology,” a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 2021-22.

Professor Eben Kirksey (Anthropology, University of Oxford) is a cultural anthropologist who 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. Questions related to science and social justice animate his most recent book, 'The Mutant Project' (2020), which offers an insiders account of the laboratory in China that created the world’s first children whose genes were edited with CRISPR-Cas9.

Filmed and edited by Zoe Broughton (https://www.zoebroughton.com/).