Amber Benezra
Assistant Professor of Science, Technology & Society, Stevens Institute of Technology
Bio
Amber Benezra is a sociocultural anthropologist researching how studies of the human microbiome intersect with biomedical ethics, public health/technological infrastructures, and care. In partnership with human microbial ecologists, she is developing an “anthropology of microbes” to address global health problems across disciplines.
Her book Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, was published by University of Minnesota Press in May 2023. Gut Anthro is an ethnography of a partnership with human microbial ecologists studying gut microbes and malnutrition. The book explores what it means to collaborate interdisciplinarily, facing the corresponding compromises and uncertainties, challenges and failures. What would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Gut Anthro follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research. Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical account of what it means to do anthropology today: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/gut-anthro.