Featured image: Ectatomma parasiticum © AntWeb
When: Thursday July 17th, 2014
Where: Google Hangouts (Sydney 6pm & London 9am)
Speakers: Deborah Gordon (Stanford University), Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent) & Eben Kirksey
Ants have long fascinated linguists, sociologists, cyberneticians, as well as media theorists who write about swarms and distributed intelligence. This conversation brings together Deborah Gordon, a biologist who has studied “interaction networks” of ants for over 15 years, and Charlotte Sleigh, a historian and critical animal studies scholar. Sleigh’s book, Six Legs Better, offers an account of how ants came to symbolize by the 1930s “one of modernity’s deepest fears: loss of selfhood.” Ants lately have been understood as “agents of enlistment,” as beings who enfold others into common worlds, in the words of Eben Kirksey who is hosting this conversation in the virtual space of The Multispecies Salon.
This event will be broadcast live on the sidelines of IUSSI 2014, the largest gathering of ant specialists (myrmecologists) in the world. Three texts will be under discussion and are available on request: “Interaction Networks” (Gordon), a selection from Six Legs Better (Sleigh), and “Interspecies Love” (Kirksey).
Google Hangouts page
