HealthXCross

📸 Pic of last week seminar by Lyle Fearnley (SUTD Singapore University of Technology & Design) on live poultry markets, zoonotic viruses, and contested signs of risk at Ca Foscari.

🦠 How have global health agencies managed the avian influenza and other zoonotic spillovers? How do governmental policies evaluate risks and health? How have scientists interpreted the signs carried by the living birds?

🎙 The conference of the Medical Anthropology Young Scholars (MAYS) - EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) network - at the Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna. This year's theme is "Critical Anthropology and Global Health: Challenges and Possibilities".

📸 Pic of Marta Scaglioni presenting her last paper on race in the sciences in the Global South. Why do scientists still rely on racial categories to produce knowledge? What can race tell us about health inequities and differentials?

📅 !

👥 HealthXCross is hosting Lyle Fearnley, Associate Professor of Anthropology at SUTD Singapore University of Technology & Design.

🦠 His talk titled "Disputed augury: Live poultry markets, zoonotic viruses, and contested signs of risk" will analyse global health approaches to the poultry markets as risky settings of zoonotic spillover, framed as semiotic strategies used by scientists
and shoppers for evaluating risk and health.

📌 The seminar will take place on Thursday, 13th, at 11 AM in Aula Biral, Malcanton Marcorà, (Ca Foscari).

🔗 For more infos: https://www.unive.it/data/agenda/8/88685.

Disputed augury: Live poultry markets, zoonotic viruses, and contested signs of risk - Unive seminario/lezione

📅 !

📗 As part of NICHE New Books in Environmental Humanities, Candace Fujikane (University of Hawaii at Manoa) will present her book "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future" (Duke University Press, 2021) at NICHE, Venice.

👉 On Monday, June, 10th, at 5 PM in Cà Bottacin (Dorsoduro, Calle Crosera).

🔗 For more infos: https://www.unive.it/data/agenda/1/86688.

Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future - Unive presentazione/dibattito

🧪 Roberta Raffaetà's talk at "Microbial Futures. The biosocial lives of small things", the symposium organized at Aarhus University.

👥 The symposium has explored the intricate web of connections between microscopic presences and humans and animals, challenging conventional paradigms and delving into biosocial theory.

📖 Here the programme: https://aias.au.dk/events/symposium-microbial-futures.

🌟 We celebrate the publishing of a new paper by Lucilla Barchetta and Roberta Raffaetà in the journal "Big Data & Society" entitled "Data as Environment, Environment as Data: One Health in Collaborative Data-Intensive Science":

🌎 The paper delves into the intricate world of One Health, exploring how health is interconnected across humans and non-humans. As we navigate the interdisciplinary challenges, technology and big data emerge as potential solutions. But there's more to it than meets the eye.

🔍 Introducing the concept of "data as environment," our paper argues that technology alone isn't enough. True progress requires agreeing on shared epistemological premises across disciplines, a process that demands time and social coordination.

📚 Drawing insights from ethnographic field research, we reveal how data is more than bits and bytes. It's an interconnected structure that blends knowledge systems, individuals, processing tools, and bio-social interactions. This "environment" is a contact structure, weaving together biomedical, environmental, and social sciences in the intricate dance of knowledge co-production.

🌐 Unlike concepts like "data infrastructures" or "data ecosystems," "data as environment" doesn't separate data from its context. Instead, it views data as an environment itself, shaped by use, maintenance, and interactions. This approach challenges the mainstream notion of data as isolated bits and highlights the political-ethical questions in our technoscientific world.

🔗 Read more here:

Data as environment, environment as data: One Health in collaborative data-intensive science - Lucilla Barchetta, Roberta Raffaetà, 2024 This article analyses the operationalization of One Health in the context of data-intensive science in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Building on ethnograph...

👥 We've been delighted to host Nicola Manghi (École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)/Waikato University) last week, who presented his ethnography in Tuvalu, 'the sinking island' in the Pacific.

🍃 Beyond being an ecological pressing issue in an interconnected world, his lecture made us reflect about what space and territoriality becomes when these are transferred into the digital space. This often occurs in our case studies, where microbes become digital traces, absent presences that matters.

🎬 Watch and listen to the seminar on NICHE YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a0lya9Pjlc.

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🦠 The Microbiome Virtual International Forum (https://www.microbiome-vif.org/en-US) is launching "Ethical dimensions of microbiome research" - a special event with talks and panel discussions on the ethics of microbiome science around the world.

📍 Online on May 21st, 22nd, and 23rd.

🖇 Here some useful links:

▶️ registration link for attendees (registration is always free): https://events.ringcentral.com/events/microbiome-vif-n-29
▶️ full program with abstracts: https://www.microbiome-vif.org/en-US/-/future-events/mvif29-21-2223-may-2024.

🌟 Come and join us online!

WELCOME TO MICROBIOME VIRTUAL INTERNATIONAL FORUM (MVIF) A recurring bite-sized alternative to multi-day microbiome conference: regular short-format (~3 hours) conferences that provide all the key elements of a traditional conference!

🌟 HealthXCross is entering the second phase of the project's life! We're excited with all the upcoming events and activities.

🖋 Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter to remain updated!

👉 Here's the link to subscribe: https://www.unive.it/pag/48250, where you can also see our newsletter archive.

Subscription to HealthXCross newsletter:Ca' Foscari University of Venice Subscription to HealthXCross newsletter

📸 Marta Scaglioni presenting her results on microbiome projects in the Global South at Leakage conference in TU Dresden!

🌏 While on fieldwork at the four corners of the world, it's challenging to meet online - and to find a suitable meeting time that works for everyone!

⌚️ Marta Scaglioni and Valeria Burgio are in Italy, getting online at 4 PM.

⌚ While for Roberta Raffaetà and Valentina Marcheselli, team meeting means getting up at 7 AM - in the US.

⌚ But the winner is Tam MK, who has to stay up late and e-meet us at 11 PM in Hong Kong!

✨ The Special Issue "Entangling data while entangling disciplines" by Roberta Raffaetà, Giovanna F***y and Francesca Esposito is circulating widely and partecipating in the debates on data and interdisciplinarity!

🖋 The article "Key points for an ethnography of AI: an approach towards crucial data" by Roanne von Voorst and Tanja Ahlin (UvA, Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam / Universiteit van Amsterdam) quotes the Special Issue to build its analysis on the importance of ethnography in the study of AI.

💻 The scholarly discussion on AI is flourishing, also in social sciences. They are calling for the inclusion of qualitative methods, especially ethnography, in investigating AI in a holistic and critical manner.

🔗 To read more, here the link to the Special Issue: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/aia/30/3/aia300301.xml.

🔗 And here the article "Key points for an ethnography of AI": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02854-4.

Special Issue Editorial Introduction: Entangling Data while Entangling Disciplines This special issue discusses forms of possible collaboration and mutual intermixing between anthropology and data science, by presenting projects and creative experiments that have been conducted astray the two fields. While we may say that all scientists work with data, this special issue focuses o...

🕍 Our Marta Scaglioni at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis!

🧪 The microbiology Institute in Tunis was founded in 1893, thanks to the nephew of Louis Pasteur, Adrien Loir. The Institute is one of the most renowned and most ancient Pasteur institutes in the world, and its scientists belong to "Patorianism", an imagined community across the world, with a founding father, a mythic history, and a mission.

🦠 The Institute espoused a "civilizing" mission in the colonies, attempting to eradicate diseases through prophylaxis, vaccines, and hygene awareness. Keeping the colony “clean” from diseases was a specific form of biopolitics, one which equated clean and good when it came to non-French bodies.

📚 The history of the Institute and of its activities in Tunisia is safeguarded in the archives, an extensive collection of documents!

🔈 Roberta Raffaetà's talk at the series of seminars organized by the group "Gli Indisciplinati" at Università degli Studi di Udine.

🧩 Talking about doing research between and across disciplines, for example between anthropology and microbiology. What are the challenges, what are the outcomes?

🪢 Invited by Patrizia Quattrocchi, University of Udine.

💥 A new HealthXCross publication is out!

💻 The Special Issue "Entangling Data while Entangling Disciplines" by Roberta Raffaetà, Giovanna F***y and Francesca Esposito is out for Anthropology in Action (Berghan). The Special Issue explores possible collaboration and mutual intermixing between anthropology and data science, by presenting projects and creative experiments that have been conducted astray the two fields.

👉 Have a look at the Special Issue here: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/aia/30/3/aia300301.xml.

👉 And at the Afterword by Roberta Raffaetà and Katherine Amato: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/aia/30/3/aia300307.xml.

Special Issue Editorial Introduction: Entangling Data while Entangling Disciplines This special issue discusses forms of possible collaboration and mutual intermixing between anthropology and data science, by presenting projects and creative experiments that have been conducted astray the two fields. While we may say that all scientists work with data, this special issue focuses o...

📅 !

🎤 Lunedì 19 febbraio alle ore 11 siamo lieti di ospitare, in sinergia con NICHE e Ca Foscari, gli autori di “Scienza, politica e società: l’approccio post-normale in teoria e nelle pratiche”, della collana CNR Edizioni Scienziati in Affanno?

📘 La collana è nata con lo scopo di promuovere e far conoscere ad un vasto pubblico gli studi e le ricerche sui cambiamenti in atto nella produzione e condivisione della conoscenza scientifica, affrontando argomenti dibattuti nell’ambito di diverse comunità scientifiche ed epistemologiche, ma che spesso rimangono confinati entro cerchie ristrette di addetti ai lavori.

🔗 La presentazione si svolgerà in italiano. Per maggiori informazioni: https://www.unive.it/data/33113/26/81965.

💻 Link per collegarsi da remoto:
https://unive.zoom.us/j/89292425619?pwd=eGNFTFV1M0pLaGN2UjlhNGlTU0JjZz09.

NICHE Dialoghi | Scienza, politica e società: l’approccio post-normale in teoria e nelle pratiche - Unive seminario/lezione

💥 A new HealthXCross publication is out!

🧠 How does the post-human turn in science frame cognition, mind, and intelligence? Roberta Raffaetà moves from an emipirical case (the gut-brain axis as developed within microbiome sciences) to analyse the entanglement of microbiome science and posthumanism, and to tackle the risk of the latter's engulfment into a neoliberal framework.

📘 The article "Cognition and Intelligence After the Post-Human Turn" is part of the Special Issue "De-Humanizing Cognition, Intelligence, and Agency. A Critical Assessment Between Philosophy, Ethics, and Science", edited by Filipo Batisti (Ca Foscari).

🔗 Here the link to the article: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/the-journal-for-the-philosophy-of-language-mind-an/2023/2/cognition-and-intelligence-after-the-post-human-tu/.

and to the Special Issue: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/the-journal-for-the-philosophy-of-language-mind-an/2023/2/.

Happy Reading!

Edizioni Ca' Foscari Edizioni Ca' Foscari - Venice University Press

💻 While investigating on the use of AI and machine learning in microbiome research and visualization, Valeria Burgio has recently read the newly published “The eye of the Master” by Matteo Pasquinelli (Verso Books, 2023). She found a visual thread in this book, that is not evident at first sight, in the study of the diagrammatic origin of machine learning.

🎤 “We are used to see algorithms as originating from long sequences of instructions and codes. Among many other things, what struck me in this book was the reconstruction of a visual and diagrammatic paradigm at the origin of the machines of the industrial revolution (as emerges from the connection between diagrams and labour in Babbage and Lovelace) as well as in contemporary AI: pattern recognition and topological distribution as visual projections of relations are at the basis of machine learning more than repetitive code strings”.

📸 In the picture, Ada Lovelace, considered the first computer programmer. She designed the first set of instruction to be executed by a machine. However, she never called it ‘algorithm’ but ‘diagram’.

our column is back!

📘 This month Tam MK has been reading a classic, Jamie Lorimer "The Probiotic Planet".

🎤 "In this book, Loimer explains the biopolitics behind the probiotic turn by comparing two apparently unrelated cases—rewilding and microbiome restoration. I like how he illuminates the tensions that emerged from what he called “controlled-decontrolling” and the search for “life to manage life” among scientists. At issue here is: can probiotic practices help humans address the problems of modern life, which has an antibiotic tendency, or will the probiotic turn and the alternatives it offers be eventually modified and appropriated by capitalism?".

🎤 Yesterday Roberta Raffaetà was invited to give the lecture "What kind of object is the microbiome?" at the Friday seminars series of the Deptartment of Anthropology of the The London School of Economics and Political Science - LSE.

🛶 These seminars run unturrupted every Friday since Malinowski established them!

📸 In the picture, the room, recently renovated, were the seminars traditionally take place.

✍️ Subscribe to our newsletter at this link: https://www.unive.it/pag/48250. A new mail with all our activities is coming out soon!

📮 You can also find our old newsletters on our website at the bottom of this page: https://www.unive.it/pag/48250.

✨ Keep yourself updated!

Subscription to HealthXCross newsletter:Ca' Foscari University of Venice Subscription to HealthXCross newsletter

📸 Throwback to Roberta Raffaetà's talk "Have We Ever Been Human? The Social Sciences After the Microbiome Revolution".

🎓 In the prestigious frame of the Meetings of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

🎤 Watch the recorded talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gusO8U8nxw.

📸 "The microbiome and its Technology: an Ethnographic Exploration"

Talk by Roberta Raffaetà at Universität Wien - Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, invited by Janina Kehr.

⚡️ Save the date!

🗣 Roberta Raffaetà's seminar "The microbiome and its technology: an ethnographic exploration" is scheduled today at 5 PM within the Wednesday Seminar at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Universität Wien, organized by Janina Kehr.

📅 Hybrid event, join online, more infos: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ksa.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/i_ksa/PDFs/Veranstaltungen/Wednesday_Seminare/Wednesday_Seminar_Raffaeta_10.01.2024.pdf.

ksa.univie.ac.at

🌟 We wish you a good start of the year with a pic from our last conference, SIAA - Società Italiana di Antropologia Applicata - Perugia, December 2023.

🧩 Here our Marta Scaglioni and Lucilla Barchetta discussing the role of anthropology in interdisciplinary research teams, with C.R.E.A., Centro Ricerche EtnoAntropologiche.

✨ Cheers to 2024 as a new year!

🌟 It has been an amazing year! We are thankful to everyone who has been part of this journey!

🎄 HealthXCross team wishes all of you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

🪵 Enjoy family time and rest!

🧫 Valentina Marcheselli has recently gone back to Thomas Gieryn’s insight about the geographic, architectural, and rethorical construction of the laboratory as a truth-spot and what he calls the paradox of place and truth.

🧪 Valentina was asking herself why laboratory ethnography (with all its challenges!) is worth it, and why it is such an irreplaceable way of getting a grasp on scientific knowledge making practices. This simple question can have many valuable answers. To move beyond the traditional idea of scientific knowledge as universal and objective, and to dig into the situatedness of science, Gieryn's work comes to help:

▶ “All scientific knowledge-claims” he writes “have a provenance: they originate at some place, and come from there. However, as they become truth, these claims shed the contingent circumstances of their making, and so become transcendent
(presumably true everywhere, supposedly from nowhere in particular) […].
That is only half the paradox. Not only do all putatively universal claims of science necessarily have a particular place of origin, but the place of provenance itself enables the transit of some claims from merely local knowledge to truth believed by many all around."

🎯 "The passage from place-saturated contingent claims to place-less transcendent truths is achieved through the geographic, architectural and rhetorical construction of a “truth-spot” (i.e., the place of provenance). Place allows claims to escape place, to transcend its suffocating particulars; place achieves placelessness.” (Gieryn 2002, p 113).

💁‍♀️ Here our Valeria Burgio in Singapore, participating in the workshop: "Visions of Microbial Health: A Conversation between Biologists, Anthropologists and Artists" organized by Lyle Fearnley and Frédéric Keck at the Singapore University of Design and Technology.

🎨 A very rich and passionate conversation about how art and science can cooperate to envision future human and environmental health mediated by microbes.

▶ See the whole program here: https://hass.sutd.edu.sg/news-events/event/events-hass/hass-workshop-visions-of-microbial-health-a-conversation-between-biologists-anthropologists-and-artists/.

🍂 Autumn is the perfect time to catch up with the classics! Scaglioni is reading Denise Ferreira Da Silva's book "Toward a Global Idea of Race" (2007, University of Minnesota Press).

📙 In this far-ranging and dense work, Denise Ferreira da Silva asks why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage?

🌍 Overcoming racial theories such as Formation Theory and Critical Race Studies, Silva considers racialization as inherently constitutive of the modern paradigm. Racial knowledge and power produce global space, through the production of whiteness as color of universality. Race keeps coming up because it is a building block in the modern world even if it is purely theoretical. Drawing on the case of the US and of Brasil, she goes through miscgenation, racial demography, and the scientific strategies of racial containment to demonstrate how the historic processes of engulfment are the layouts of the modern knowledge and culture production trajectories.

▶ https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/toward-a-global-idea-of-race

📝 Job position open!

Bandi assegni di ricerca e progetti collaborativi:Università Ca' Foscari Venezia Bandi assegni di ricerca e progetti collaborativi