The Perils and Potentials of Microbial Abundance: From Fermented Foods to Astrobiology - A talk by Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson February 24, 2011

Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of E. coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in arsenic environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through presents and possible futures of what Foucault called "biopolitics." In this talk, we propose two extensions to traditional biopolitics: microbiopolitics and symbiopolitics, each pressing us to think about the scales and values through which human lives are entangled with microbial life.
Helmreich and Paxson are professors of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Helmreich's research examines the works and lives of contemporary biologists puzzling through the conceptual boundaries of “life” as a category of analysis. He has written extensively on Artificial Life, most notably in Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998), which in 2001 won the Diana Forsythe Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association. His latest book, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty. Working alongside scientists in labs and at sea, Helmreich charts how revolutions in genomics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing press marine biologists to see the sea as animated by its smallest inhabitants: marine microbes, which are being rendered meaningful as pointers to the origin of life, barometers of climate change, raw materials for biotechnology, and analogues for extraterrestrial life.

Paxson's work explores how people grapple with changing socioeconomic conditions and new bioscientific knowledge through everyday ethical practices, especially those having to do with reproduction and food. In the 1990s, she conducted two years of doctoral fieldwork in Athens, Greece on changing ideas about motherhood and fertility control. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece was published in 2004 by University of California Press. She is now at work on an ethnographic study of American artisanal cheesemakers funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Organized by the HumanNonHuman Research Collaborative.