Activism
Eben is an advocate for human rights, environmental justice, and equality in health care.
He works at the intersection of grassroots social movements and conventional institutions of power. Eben has been working with intersectional political struggles on the streets of New York City since the days of Occupy Wall Street. Equally at home within the halls of power in Washington D.C., Eben has also testified at a Hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Protesting outside the White House with Audryne Karma, daughter of an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.
West Papua
Eben cut his teeth as an activist while working in solidarity with Indigenous peoples from West Papua. In 1998 he witnessed a massacre by the Indonesian military in West Papua, and ever since he has been working to achieve peace in conditions of genocide. Working in coalition with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, enabled Eben to help curtail U.S. military assistance to Indonesia. Testimony at a U.S. Congressional Hearing in 2010, was the culmination of more than a decade of meetings with policy makers in Washington. Along with other witnesses and survivors, Eben helped host a Citizens Tribunal on the fifteen year anniversary of the Biak Massacre.
Eben Kirksey arrived in Biak harbor on July 5th, 1998, the day before the attack. He was then an exchange student at Bird of Paradise University (UNCEN) and was traveling through Biak on his way to conduct anthropological research in the highlands. Waylaid in Biak for several days, he talked with many of the protesters who were gathered under the water tower and took pictures of the Navy ships that dumped people at sea. Later, as a graduate student at the University of Oxford, Kirksey returned to Biak to interview key survivors of the massacre. His book, Freedom in Entangled Worlds, contains passages from his personal journal and reports on his findings.
Peaceful Indigenous leaders gathered under a water tower and were gunned down by Indonesian security forces.
In New York City Eben has participated in actions organized by the diverse groups—like Extinction Rebellion, FTP, and Occupy Wall Street—that have produced spaces of political possibility. With multiple family members who have survived cancer, Eben has recently become an advocate for equality in access to cutting-edge medicine.
Eben’s latest research about CRISPR gene editing explores inequality and innovation. With multi-million dollar gene therapies hitting the market, only the elite are now able to afford life saving treatments. Some of the world’s first “edited” people are veteran HIV-activists who have been campaigning for science and justice over the decades. The story of their struggle against marginalization and discrimination is relevant to many other patient communities--cancer survivors, people with genetic diseases--who are struggling to afford life-saving treatments.
New Book
Coming October 20th, 2020
The Mutant Project
"The Mutant Project takes us on an eye-opening global adventure...Eben Kirksey asks crucial questions at the heart of science and social justice—not only who will have access to new genetic technologies, but also who decides how and why they are developed? Power and profit, not human health and wellbeing, steer the answers."
--Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention
