ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Crafts of Microbes: Women and Gender from Antibiotics to Genetic Engineering and the Microbiome

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

From early histories of infections, vaccines and hygiene to the spread of antibiotics, antimicrobial resistance and the construction of the concept of microbiome, there took place the transits of knowledge-practices with microbes (Creager 2007; Lee 2021; Núñez Casal 2021; Brives, Rest and Sariola 2021; Santesmases 2016), of cultures and culturing experiments. The underwent shifts included debates, namings and renamings of phenomena, connections and disconnections, and interspecies relationships’ reconstructions. For historicizing such shifts, microbes as subject, as main characters, are fully on focus. In these long trajectories, women and gender have been agents for the onto-epistemologies that microbes have been and have produced. This session focus on the shifting of audiences and narratives of microbial crafts in which women and gender played. It is composed by a set of contributions that put microbes and the commodities they manufactured at the core of a gender perspective in the history of epistemic experiences.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Angela Creager, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Dispatches from the Other: Proto-Immunology, Microbiome Science, and the Epistolary Life of Biology - Andrea Núñez Casal, CSIC, Soain

• Between genes, gender, and microbes: women scientists in genetic engineering in Mexico during the 1980s and the case of the first genetic sequencing - Marco Ornelas-Cruces, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Ana Barahona, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

• Antimicrobial resistance: A reflection of gender structures - Elodie Rosanne Santiago, University of the Basque Country

• Asexual discrimination: A case history in why the lack of interdisciplinary communication can hinder scientific progress - Neeraja Sankaran, Ahmedaband University

Session Organizer

• Maria J Santesmases, CSIC, Spain