Agenda

“Learning With” Workshop Series
Manuals of Immuno(i)logical Possibilities: Embassy Letters, Biocapital, and the Microbiomisation of Difference
Andrea Núñez Casal in dialogue with Antonia Majaca Friedman, DFBC, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

March 5 2026  2–6 PM DEC ROOM 2, Cannaregio 873, Fondamenta S. Giobbe, Venezia

A. N. Casal is a Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (IFS-CSIC), Madrid. Trained in molecular biology before turning to cultural studies at Goldsmiths (PhD 2019), her research examines how post-genomic life sciences—microbiome science, immunology, antimicrobial resistance, Planetary Health—reconfigure the boundaries between biology, politics, and alterity. Her central concept, microbiomisation, describes how social relations and conditions of life are biologised through microbial attribution: identity, immunity, and health are reframed in ecological terms, while structural inequalities of race, class, gender, and coloniality persist in how microbial diversity and wellbeing are distributed. A key empirical site is antimicrobial resistance (AMR), approached as a biosocial and geopolitical problem shaped by care infrastructures, pharmaceuticalisation, agro-industrial regimes, and inequality. Methodologically, Núñez Casal has developed feminist para-ethnography, positioning the social sciences and humanities between clinical protocols and vernacular health practices across Brazil, South Korea, the UK, and the US. Her monograph, Scales of Alterity, explores how immunitary and ecological models of otherness shape subjectivities and practices of care.
This session proposes a genealogical and speculative inquiry into immunity, not as a stable biomedical object but as a shifting set of manuals: instructions and epistemic protocols through which bodies, microbes, and differences are rendered governable or curable. We begin with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s accounts of Ottoman variolation in eighteenth-century Constantinople. Often celebrated as cultural translation or proto-feminist mediation, the Turkish Embassy Letters also function as a manual of immuno(i)logical possibility, recording women’s domestic practices while opening them to validation and institutional re-coding in Britain. Placed in friction with contemporary microbiome research in Latin America—where Indigenous and rural communities are framed as reservoirs of “ancestral” microbial diversity—the session explores how practices such as fermentation, breastfeeding, and food preparation are translated into microbial profiles and mobilised for therapeutic innovation elsewhere. Across these sites, microbiomisation operates concretely: the conditions sustaining microbial diversity remain excluded from biomedical benefit, while older logics of self/other and inclusion/exclusion are reanimated in ecological language. Inspired by David Garcia’s Studio Map 002, the workshop proceeds through associative mapping, tracing connections between historical documents, research practices, labour, and imaginaries of cure. Through close readings of Montagu’s letters and contemporary microbiome materials, the session attends to what disappears in translation: gendered labour, asymmetries between participation and biocapital, and the transformation of lived practices into biomedical assets. It asks what it might mean to imagine alternative manuals—other ways of learning with immunity that resist closure and extraction. “Learning With” is an experimental workshop series and the primary methodology of the Radical Epistemologies cluster at NICHE, cultivating epistemic commoning within Venice’s transient conditions. Registration antonia.friedman@unive.it