Social Practices and Microscopic Matter: Challenging Ideas about Bodies, Microbes and Health

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 p