Biology Archives - Public Seminar

Body & Mind

Gut Feeling

In Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange digs into the microbiome and lets it spill out on the page

June 29, 2026 • by Colette Estelle

“For me, the curiosity of the microbe rests on the ambivalent outcomes of its extreme connectedness,” says writer Charlotte Strange: “Its capacity to spoil, sour, and upset, and the slipperiness with which it moves through medical and colloquial speech.” In their chapbook Strange Biology (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), a collection of essays, ...

(En)gendering Health and Illness in the time of Biomedicalization

May 6, 2016 • by Silje Kristine Anderson

How do prevailing ideologies of gender and of biomedicine in the U.S. shape the experience of living in the body? How do they influence how illness is constructed, experienced, and medically managed? This presentation will provide an overview of recent and ongoing research undertaken by the presenter and her collaborators, ...

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

September 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...