Photo by Franck Genten, licensed under CC BY NC ND.

The materiality of human bodies at the smallest scales—genes, microbes, chemicals, hormones—is increasingly being understood as both responsive to broader environmental contexts and as a site where environments are manifested in health and well-being. Phenomena from epigenetics to the microbiome, from toxic stress to toxic pollution, are raising new questions among the scientific community. They point to indeterminacies in personal and social capacities that might be transmitted across generations and implicated in patterns of inequality. Indigenous, activist, and popular knowledges operate alongside and in various relationships to these shifts in scientific paradigms. From the Anthropocene to postgenomic science, a tidal shift in approaches to human (and nonhuman) bodies is making it untenable to consider health as an individual property limited to the space of one’s body or the time of one’s lifespan—or even as something wholly human. This series probes the relationship between changing bio-scientific ideas about bodies and the lived realities of bodies in contemporary societies.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: Embodied Ecologies

Introduction: Embodied Ecologies

The materiality of human bodies at the smallest scales—genes, microbes, chemicals, hormones—is increasingly being understood as both responsive to broader envir... More

Taste Environments

Taste Environments

Eating dissolves boundaries between the body and environment, as that which is outside the body is literally and figuratively incorporated into it. The mouth is... More

Porosity and Protection

Porosity and Protection

I first saw the traces of destruction in the spring of 2014, when Yasuko, an art therapist, and I were driving toward a coastal village north of the “difficult ... More

Microbial Management

Microbial Management

“I think gut flora [chōnai furo-ra] is really important to health and to food allergies,” said Tomoko, a woman in her late forties and the mother of a multiply ... More

Triple Toxicity

Triple Toxicity

A few years into my fieldwork on birth culture in California, I went to meet Harmony at a strip of shops near the beach in Santa Cruz. The coffeeshop was packed... More

Mineralized Biologies

Mineralized Biologies

“If you do not have lead, you are not an Oroyan!” These words reached my ear on the draft of an icy wind, as I stood huddled in a small group on the side of Per... More

Stem Cell Niches

Stem Cell Niches

“Inside every stem cell is an organ waiting to happen.” This statement, drawn from a recent article in Nature Methods (Eisenstein 2018, 19), suggests that stem ... More

Epigenetic In/Fertilities

Epigenetic In/Fertilities

Infertility has historically been conceptualized as a women’s problem, and women’s bodies continue to take center stage during infertility treatments. Social sc... More

Epicrisis and My Shriveled Plant Moment

Epicrisis and My Shriveled Plant Moment

A friend I’ll call Mary labeled it her “shriveled plant moment.” In 2003, Mary was the director of a development organization that operated in a group of indige... More

For Microbes

For Microbes

I reached out to Dr. Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, because my fieldwork among human microbiome researchers had m... More

Modulating Resistance

Modulating Resistance

In the most recent addition to the Star Trek lineage, Star Trek: Discovery, the body emerges as a modulator in microscopic multispecies entanglements. The serie... More

Epigenetics and Methodological Limits

Epigenetics and Methodological Limits

What are the methodological challenges of exploring corporeal entanglements, or embodied ecologies, in the clinical translation of epigenetics? A variety of re... More

No Relation

No Relation

Carla’s kitchen is a small room at a corner of her house. Her mother used to cook for a large, extended family in a busy, open-air courtyard. But Carla cooks fo... More

Centering Milieux

Centering Milieux

This series of short essays leads us unerringly toward the necessity of striving for an eclipse of linear, reductionistic thinking when conceptualizing and anal... More