Special Guest Seminar with Dr. Timothy Gitzen

Dr. Timothy Gitzen is an assistant professor of anthropology at Wake Forest University and a visiting researcher at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes at the University of Helsinki. Author of multiple books and several journal articles, his research brings together the anthropology of microbes and biology, science and technology studies, security studies, and queer theory.

Speculating Microbes, Speculative Ethnography

Abstract

This discussion offers the method of speculative ethnography as a way of thinking and writing about microbes: how do we encounter microbes in entangling ways that we cannot immediately see and that often confound human planning for the future? Speculative ethnography is a method to interrogate those uncertain and imagined futures and includes any kind of engagement with those possible futures to build ethical, just, and equitable relations, be they between ethnographers, ethnographer and more-than-human collaborators, or ethnographer and microbial interlocutors. I mobilize anthropological research on frozen microbes in the Arctic to query the scientific, bioartistic, and speculative fiction stories told of these microbes, examining both their Pleistocene past and their potential Anthropocene futures.

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