Teaching with microbes: Biopolitical lessons from fermentation.

About the speaker: Megan A. Carney is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist with specializations in migration and health, food insecurity, and the politics of care. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of two books, the award-winning "The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders" (2015, University of California Press) and "Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean" (forthcoming, University of California Press). She is the recent recipient of a Fulbright Schuman Faculty Award and was previously a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project. Some of her public writing has appeared in Civil Eats, Scientific American, The Hill, Sapiens, and The Conversation. 

https://anthropology.arizona.edu/user/megan-carney-sabbatical-spring-2021
Twitter: @megan_a_carney 

About the seminar:  For the past several years and with emerging research on microbiomes, social scientists and humanities scholars have increasingly turned to microbes as "good to think with" in examining the intersections between human health and the environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has both amplified much of this transdisciplinary interest in microbial life and human microbiomes, and sparked new questions about the (micro)biopolitics shaping uneven health outcomes across the human life course. This talk reflects on using fermentation as a pedagogical tool for understanding the historical conditions and contemporary social and institutional arrangements that affect microbial distribution and exposure.