BSAS: Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland

Name: BSAS: Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland
Start: 2025-10-16T14:15:00+02:00
End: 2025-10-16T15:30:00+02:00
Location: Det samfunnsvitenskapelige fakultet, UiB Samfunnsfag

Schedule

Thu Oct 16 2025 at 02:15 pm to 03:30 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Det samfunnsvitenskapelige fakultet, UiB Samfunnsfag | Bergen, HO

Location: Faculty of Social Science (Lauritz Meltzers hus), 9th floor
The seminar will be followed by informal drinks and discussions in the corner room at the Department of Social Anthropology on the 8th floor. All are welcome!
Title:
Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland
Abstract:
Milk is a food rife with meaning and thick with lively possibilities. “Raw,” or unpasteurized milk, has played a particularly contentious role in food safety efforts in the United States where legal frameworks vary by state and raw milk drinking is on the rise, despite the consequent increase in foodborne illness. While current debates about raw milk drinking tend to feature “raw milk influencers” and state representatives, with polarized positions in relation to food safety, dairy producers offer another perspective. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with dairy farmers, dairy experts, and community members in and around Wisconsin, USA, this talk shows how raw milk is an embedded food in dairy production ecologies. Through attending to the intimate labors of milking and working with cows, I argue that raw milk and the microbes therein reconstitute bodies and relations in an ongoing and embedded landscape of encounter. These reconstitutions contribute to digestive belonging, an embodied connection to place that takes terroir beyond the palate and into the gut. Centering microbes, not as passive inhabitants, but as capable of remaking everyday work, human digestion and immunity, and kin-making, unfurls the capacities of microbes to forge connections and shape social life in dairyworlds.
About the speaker:
Katy Overstreet is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. Katy is a coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecologies Research Cluster and a core member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures. Katy has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in midwestern dairy worlds of the United States. This work takes a multispecies approach to co-species labor and bioindustrialization, examining how specific technologies shape agricultural modes of living and dying. Katy also collaborates with veterinary and animal welfare researchers to develop theory and methods for more livable agrifood worlds. In addition, Katy engages in “slow research” more-than-human landscapes in Denmark.

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About BSAS:
Ever since its beginnings in the 1960s, our Bergen Social Anthropology Seminars (BSAS) series have been free and open to the public. So if you're in Bergen, come and join us in our beautiful 9th floor seminar room with a view of the city. We hope to see you there!