Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstraction of crucial forces in our everyday lives. Welcome to a multidisciplinary conversation about microbes, featuring Amber Benezra (
Gut Anthro), Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (
Microbial Resolution), and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (
American Disgust) in a wide-ranging conversation that opens up possibilities for imagining more equitable approaches to science, visualizing and embodying the microbe, and conceptualizing health at individual, societal, and planetary levels.
Amber Benezra is assistant professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and is author of
Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, a finalist for the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.
“We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling,
Gut Anthro is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are.”
—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of
The Weight of Obesity