Dirty parenting and toxic terroir: The symbiopolitics of securing intergenerational microbial transmission

The human microbiome occupies a central place in emergent post-genomic understandings of disease. Within this space, the human-microbial relations which emerge through processes of birthing and parenting have become a particular locus of concern. These reproductive practices are often pathologized, as experts praise the benefits of breastfeeding, ‘natural’ birth and childhood exposure to dirt, and warn against the rise in c-sections and the over-use of antibiotics, particularly in respect to their role in chronic and non-communicable diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and asthma. Understanding the implications of these trends, we argue, requires new conceptual approaches sensitive to the role of intergenerational and kinship relations, and the communities within which these are embedded, in shaping disease outcomes. Building on traditional disease ecology approaches to understanding how environments and social relations shape disease risk, we propose two key concepts – toxic terroir and symbiopolitics - which serve to respectively help us to better understand (i) the human as a multigenerational and environmentally entangled microbial subject; and (ii) the forms of microbial knowledge and expertise are being used to inform interventions into parenting practices.

Zoom link : https://epfl.zoom.us/j/66516277875