Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstraction of crucial forces in our everyday lives. Welcome to a multidisciplinary conversation about microbes, featuring Amber Benezra (Gut Anthro), Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (Microbial Resolution), and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (American Disgust) in a wide-ranging conversation that opens up possibilities for imagining more equitable approaches to science, visualizing and embodying the microbe, and conceptualizing health at individual, societal, and planetary levels.


Amber Benezra is assistant professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and is author of Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, a finalist for the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California, Riverside, and is author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes.

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, and is author of American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within; The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life; Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology; and Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age. 


Praise for the books:
“We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling, Gut Anthro is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are.”
—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of The Weight of Obesity

“Gloria Chan-Sook Kim’s visual methodology proposes a clear optic for understanding how global health responses to microbial threats will fail unless we wrestle with the systems that perpetuate the conditions for the next mutant microbe on the horizon.” 
—Stefanie R. Fishel, author of The Microbial State

“American Disgust pushes readers to think beyond individual taste to consider how whiteness shapes what is acceptable or profane and how to grow our capacity for the unfamiliar. It is a refreshing take on a long-debated concept.”
—Ashanté M. Reese, coeditor of Black Food Matters



Books by Amber Benezra, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer are available from University of Minnesota Press.

It’s a microbe’s world. We just live in it.

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

It’s a microbe’s world. We just live in it.

University of Minnesota Press

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