Jack Jiang is a PhD student in anthropology at the New School for Social Research.

His dissertation centers on the activist community of anti-natalists in Tokyo and Bangalore. In recent years, anti-natalist activists have become increasingly visible as they question the ethics of continued human reproduction. Is the suffering that one experiences in life, both individually and collectively, enough for one to reject further procreation? What, if anything, is the purpose of continuing life (as we know it)?

These questions are endemic to modern bioethical debates as well as existentialist philosophy. Each of these histories have influenced contemporary anti-natalists. But these questions are also germane to a time increasingly saturated by end-time imaginaries, from ecological breakdown and demographic collapse, to political-economic precarity. What shapes the contours of these end-time imaginaries, and what new social forms might they give rise to? Is there something we can learn ethically from the issues that anti-natalists raise?

Suturing the philosophical, the political, the moral, and the ecological, my research interests cover broadly the anthropology death and extinction, religion and secularism, and intergenerational ethics.

<aside> ✉️ jianj963[at]newschool[dot]edu

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Writings

CV