Join us on Thursday, March 30 at 7:00 p.m. for the Philosophy Now Lecture, "Kinship, Citizenship: 23andMe and the End of Democratic Life," featuring Stony Brook University Associate Professor of Philosophy Anne O'Byrne, Ph.D.
The event is free and open to the public.
"Kinship, Citizenship: 23andMe and the End of Democratic Life"
Democracy was invented to put an end to a corrupt system of aristocratic inheritance, so members of a democracy strictly speaking have no shared origin and, in its most radical form, democracy is the community of those who have nothing in common. Yet living democracies are made up of people of many generations, states still grant citizenship on the basis of jus sanguinis, and millions of people submit DNA samples to large databases in an effort to find out where they come from and who they are. What is at stake for democracy in this desire to have kinship with people we have never met? Does it point, at best, to a certain democratic deficit? Or might it be, at worst, on a slippery slope toward racist nationalism?
About Anne O'Byrne
Dr. Anne O'Byrne teaches in the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University. She works on radical democracy, identity, natality, embodiment, education, gender, race and genocide, and is the author of The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Being (Fordham, 2023) and Natality and Finitude (Indiana, 2010). Other works include Logics of Genocide: the Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World (Routledge, 2020), edited with Martin Shuster, and translations from French of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 1996), Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality (Fordham University Press, 2013), and other works.