The political economy of emerging planetary microbial data platforms

This talk examines the entangled politics of microbiome research in complex biosocial environments, drawing on fieldwork in the Ganges River region. Dr Victor Secco explores how antimicrobial resistance (AMR), phage therapy, and microbial sampling intersect with religious ritual, failing infrastructure, and geopolitical inequalities. He challenges assumptions of neutrality in planetary microbial data platforms, asking what microbiome stewardship looks like in contested ecological and epistemic spaces.