Social Practice Theory and Public Health: Microbes, Bodies and Environments
Wed 11 - Thu 12 Jun 2025
For further information about accessibility at this event, please email [email protected].
- Venue
- Mary Ward House, London, WC1H 9SN
- Price
- £75 for both days
- Event series
- The British Academy Conferences
British Academy/Wellcome Trust Conferences bring together scholars and specialists from around the world to explore themes related to health and wellbeing.
Biological processes and microbial ecologies are not explained solely by nature. As social research shows, interactions between microbes and other organisms, and related patterns of coevolution, depend on forms of exposure and cohabitation that do not arise by chance. Likewise, the spread and mutation of contagious diseases and resistances to them are inseparable from the social organisation of matter and of human and non-human life.
Social practice theorists argue that practices – defined as shared, materially mediated, ‘doings and sayings’ that exist across different places and time – are fundamental units for analysing and understanding these relations.
Focusing on practices gives researchers a distinctive and powerful repertoire of ideas about materiality, inequality and global change. This conference demonstrates the relevance of this work for challenges that lie ahead, and for building alliances between the social, medical and natural sciences to tackle human-microbial relations in a rapidly changing climate.
Conference convenors
- Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University
- Cecily Maller, RMIT University
- Simon Cohn, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Speakers
- Stan Blue, Lancaster University
- Karl Broome, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Clare Chandler, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- Simon Cohn, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- Nick Crossley, University of Manchester
- Beth Greenhough, University of Oxford
- Steve Hinchliffe, University of Exeter
- Mikko Jauho, University of Helsinki
- Jamie Lorimer, University of Oxford
- Cecily Maller, RMIT University
- Maurizio Meloni, Deakin University
- Paula Palanco Lopez, University of Oulu
- Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University
- Rachel Wakefield Rann, University of Technology, Sydney
Further information
Tickets cost £75 for both days. Attendance is by open call for participants. If you would like to join this event, please see the open call for participants for further information.
If you have any questions about this event please refer to our Events FAQs or email [email protected].
Image credit: Photo by d3sign/Getty Images
