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

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 has 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 public health bring these resources to bear on fundamental questions about scale and transmission, the place of human bodies in social and biological theory, and concepts of health, risk and disease. Informed by real-life examples relating to food, insects, water and air, the spread of disease and antimicrobial resistance, the result is an agenda-setting book positioned at the intersection of research and policy.

It will appeal to scholars and academics with interest in social theory, microbes and public health, as well as academics and advanced students of geography, anthropology, sociology, medical sociology, social studies of science and the history of health.

Elizabeth Shove is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She is well known for her work on social theories of practice.

Cecily Maller is Professor of Human Geography at the Centre for Urban Research, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia. She is interested in human-environment relationships in urban settings and their implications for health outcomes.

Simon Cohn is Professor in Medical Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom. Simon is a medical anthropologist with a particular interest in biomedicine and public health in the UK and other high-income settings.