Social Practices and Microscopic Matter

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 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 interested in social theory, microbes, and public health, and well as academics and advanced students of geography, anthropology, sociology, medical sociology, social studies of science, and the history of health.