Together with other collaborators, some members from Cultures of Cultures will be hosting the panel ‘Living with Microbes’ in the upcoming EASA Conference, to be celebrated in Lisbon, 21-24 July 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal.
The theme of the conference is ‘New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe’, and you can find the general call for papers here: https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2020/cfp
Panel abstract
This panel explores emerging ecologies in and around microbes. Novel findings about the ubiquitousness of microbes within bodies and environments, has illuminated new multi-species relationalities. While antibiotics are simultaneously increasingly becoming redundant due to drug resistance, modern medicine is at the risk of being turned back by a century. In this era, we argue, it is vital to gain a more granular view of the various practices of relation-making between humans, animals and microbes. While these changes have often been conceptualized as turns in human-microbe relations (Paxson, 2008; Lorimer, 2017), this panel invites papers that think about how various new and old notions about microbes overlap rather than superseed each other, producing spaces for microbial sociality to manifest in novel ways. Topics could include, but are not limited to, examples of the following: – Studies of novel biotechnologies of pre- and probiotic tools – Biographies of antibiotics, bacteriophages and diagnostics, the pharmaceutical industry and other R&D endeavours – How are novel subjectivities and national programmes constructed through microbiome research and as targets of AMR related activities, policies and research? – How are resistomes and microbiotas explored and compared? – The flows of resistance embedded in more-than-human social forms involving humans, animals, and the environment – How do people live with microbes in fermentation? – How is immunity and well-being thought about in the absence of antibiotics? – How boundaries of human and nonhuman bodies are un/made by the bacteria that flow between environments and bodies?
Please send your abstract (max 250 words) using the EASA submission system by 20 January 2020. To do this, find our session in the list of panels and click on ‘Propose paper’. You can find more instructions in the general call for papers linked above.
We look forward to reading your submissions!
Convenors:
Salla Sariola (University of Helsinki)
Matthäus Rest (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)
Charlotte Brives (CNRS CED-UMR5116)
Jose A. Cañada (University of Helsinki)
