The Microbes and Social Equity working group and the University of Maine Institute of Medicine present the MSE spring speaker series 2022.
April 27, 12:00 - 13:00 EST
"What Connects Us: stories of working across difference with humans and microbes"
Dr. Maya Hey is a postdoctoral researcher with the Future Organisms project as part of an international trans-disciplinary team investigating Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). She brings a humanities and social science perspective to the life sciences, calling upon feminist, intersectional, and multispecies approaches to map out human response-ability in a more-than-human world. She is vested in questions related to fermentation, particularly as they relate to discourses of health, the rhetoric of microbiomes, and how we come to know microbial life."
Talk summary:
What connects us across different scales of life? This talk examines three case studies—on fermentation, conversation, and innovation—to better understand how micro-organisms affect macro-cultures and vice-versa, with emphasis on working
with difference instead of resolving them.
About the 2022 series: Microbes influence the health and well-being of all living things—individuals, communities, and broader environmental networks which span internationally. The Microbes and Social Equity group is presenting a speaker series, hosted by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, which will specifically highlight how the different kinds of microbes that we interact with are influenced by aspects of daily life as well as the social policies which support or oppress livelihoods. The virtual speaker series aims to give students, staff, and faculty at UMaine, as well as our broader educational community, the opportunity to learn about how social equity and microbes intersect to shape health in wide range of settings—how we define what a ‘healthy human microbe’ is, how soil microbes shape community health, what challenges the integration of the microbiome research in a One Health perspective, and more. This speaker series will explore the ways that microbes connect public policy, social disparities, and human health, as well as ongoing research, education, policy, and innovation in this field.
