Eben Kirksey, Princeton University
Drexel University, Center for Science, Technology, and Society (Philadelphia, PA)
Wednesday, May 18, 2016 1:00 pm EDT
Time: 12:00 PM-1:50 PM
Location: Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building, Room 104 (NEW LOCATION!), 3245 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
The Center for STS welcomes Eben Kirksey, PhD, a visiting faculty member in anthropology at Princeton University, and senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He studies the dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history.
In his lecture, "The Xenopus Pregnancy Test: A Performative Experiment," Kirksey blurs the boundaries between performance art, science and technology in this lecture about the recreation of an antiquated medical test.
There is an appreciable distance between the biochemistry of "being pregnant" and the experience of recognizing oneself as pregnant — a speculative gap that technology can serve to narrow or widen depending on how one chooses to choreograph an ontological state. Conducting an outmoded pregnancy test with live Xenopus frogs, we probed the contours of this gap. As we took this antiquated bioassay out of medical archives we conducted a performative experiment — an intervention that blurred the boundaries between performance art, science and ethnography. Like queer enactments of gender, performative experiments exhibit the performativity of conventional science and thereby make scientific modes of knowledge production and claims available for critical inspection.
Contact Information
Irene Cho
215.571.3852
irene.cho@drexel.edu