Dear Colleague,
Happy New Year! Looking for some 2019 reading? Take a look at these two thought-provoking pieces we’re highlighting this month over on our AMIS website:
The first is a commentary by Andrea Núñez Casal, a PhD candidate and Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Goldsmiths. Andrea’s piece provides a precis on her forthcoming work, which delves into the political economy of the microbiome in order to theorise the ‘biology of capital’. The second is a new paper out this month by Beth Greenhough, Andrew Dwyer, Richard Grenyer, Timothy Hodgetts, Carmen McLeod & Jamie Lorimer, entitled ‘Unsettling antibiosis: How might interdisciplinary researchers generate a feeling for the microbiome and to what effect?’. This article too is a look into the affective interactions with microbial life and how new interactions with, and visualisations of, microbial life reorganises (or not) a microbiopolitics at home.
One other bit of news is that we’re hiring! AMIS is looking for a new AMR Project Co-ordinator to join our group. Please pass on the details to anyone who might be interested!
Best
Clare and Laurie
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Commentary: The ‘biology of history' as the 'biology of capital'
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), microbiome scientists insist, is the main cause of the loss of microbial diversity in high-income countries. Biomedical, public health and science policy epistemologies describe AMR as a phenomenon of global proportions, horizontally distributed, affecting all the same, rich and poor. I sustain the opposite. AMR is not global. It does not affect everyone the same.
Read the commentary
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Essential Reading: Unsettling Antibiosis:
How might
interdisciplinary
researchers generate a feeling for the
microbiome and to what effect?
Decades of active public health messaging about the dangers of pathogenic microbes has led to a Western society dominated by an antibiotic worldview; however recent scientific and social interest in the microbiome suggests an emerging counter-current of more probiotic sentiments. Such stirrings are supported by cultural curiosity around the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, or the idea it is possible to be ‘too clean’ and a certain amount of microbial exposure is essential for health. These trends resonate with the ways in which scientists too have adopted a more ‘ecological’ perspective on the microbiome. This paper seeks to expand on such probiotic tendencies by proposing an interdisciplinary methodology researchers might use to generate more-than-antibiotic relations between lay participants and their domestic microbiome.
Read here
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Researchers in AMR: Andrea Núñez Casal
Andrea works at the intersections of feminist and decolonial science and technology studies (STS), body studies and anthropology of science. Andrea's work is concerned with the social-biological interplay in postgenomic science – particularly in relation to the human microbiome – as well as with biosocial solutions to health inequalities associated with AMR.
Read more about Andrea
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Notice Board
AMIS at LSHTM is hiring a new Project Co-Ordinator. See here for details!
The Wellcome Trust's Engagement Fellowships develop emerging leaders from a range of backgrounds so they can engage the public with health research. This year they are highlighting some areas of interest and are seeking applications (whether researchers, or from another sector) who want to engage people with future health challenges, including drug-resistant infections. Please have a look through the information on our website to see whether you would be interested in this opportunity and how it might work for you: https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/engagement-fellowships
Please email AnthropologyAMR@lshtm.ac.uk if you have any information you'd like to distribute on the AMIS programme notice board.
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