Social Practices and Microscopic Matter

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This timely volume demonstrates the power and the potential of social theory, including theories of practice, histories and biographies of disease, and geographical accounts of cohabitation and contagion, to explore how biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other.

It is widely recognised that biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other, but there is much less agreement about what this means, or about how this interweaving should be conceptualised and studied. Whilst recognising that there has been huge growth in more-than-human approaches and in contributions from science and technology studies and feminist scholarship, this volume advocates that more ideas are needed if we are to address global threats, including the impacts of climate change, growing antimicrobial resistance, pandemics, the geographies and distribution of zoonoses and other large biosocial phenomena.

Contributors from disciplines including anthropology, geography, sociology and public health bring these resources to bear on fundamental questions about scale and transmission, the place of human bodies in social and biological theory, and concepts of health, risk and disease. Informed by real-life examples relating to food, insects, water and air, the spread of disease and antimicrobial resistance, the result is an agenda-setting book positioned at the intersection of research and policy.

It will appeal to scholars and academics with interest in social theory, microbes and public health, as well as academics and advanced students of geography, anthropology, sociology, medical sociology, social studies of science and the history of health.

Obsah

1. Setting the scene: conceptualising microbes, bodies and health – contributions and propositions from social theory Framing concepts of contagion – introducing Part 1 2. Conceptualising contagion: disease situations and the histories and geographies of practice 3. Practices, spaces and species: rethinking human-mosquito interactions and disease transmission Framing matters of microscopic materiality – introducing Part 2 4. Conceptualising microbial materiality beyond simple categories 5. Microbiome repair: probiotic practices in agriculture 6. Holobiont public health? Changing practices of allergy prevention in Finland 7. Microbial atmospheres: healthcare architectures as a ‘more than human’ dispositive Framing bodies and human health – introducing Part 3 8. Practice Theory and the Biosocial Body 9. Microbes at large in the hospital: challenging concepts of care, contact and contamination Ideas and implications for research and policy – introducing Part 4 10. Dysbiotic times: life in distress and the politics of knowledge in microbiome research 11. Epidemiology, individualism and the virus: a critical analysis of policy responses to COVID 19 in the UK 12. What practice theories bring to studies of microbes and societies