PostNatural Guest Lecture: Eben Kirksey

Thursday, Nov 20th, starting at 6PM
Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
CFA 111, Carnegie Mellon University
Presented by The Center for PostNatural History

PostNatural Guest Lecturer Eben Kirksey will be speaking about the curiously strange relationship between humans and captive raised laboratory frogs. Their existence has been intertwined ever since African Clawed Frogs were first used as a human pregnancy test in the mid 1930’s. Today the frogs are used in laboratories all over the world and are implicated, by some researchers, in the spread of a fungus that threatens amphibian populations world-wide. Eben’s newly published book ‘The Multispecies Salon’ is a collection of essays by theorists and artists that explores a series of entangled questions: Which species flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide? Presentation will include a reenactment of the xenopus pregnancy test.