"The Perils and Promises of Microbial Abundance: Science, Politics, and Value, from Artisan Cheese to Alien Seas"

Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of E. coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to 2010 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.