Modernity and the gut

Gut-based conditions are on the rise worldwide as are broader patterns of disrupted relationships between humans and food. In particular, the last two decades have witnessed an explosion of scientific research on: (1) the gut and its relationship with the human brain, hormones, and immune system, (2) the gut as a site of interaction between the human and non-human species, and (3) the impact of the built environment on the gut. Alongside this scholarship is a fast-growing body of work within the humanities and social sciences scrutinising the importance of the gut for systemic health and disease, human identity, and our relationship with other organisms. Studying the gut in this multidisciplinary manner shows that eating and digesting are not only physiological processes but are located within cultural, political, and social realms. As such, fully understanding the gut’s functions and importance requires a convergence of perspectives, including feminist, queer, philosophical, literary, decolonial, historical, social, political, and more-than-human.

The Collection seeks to bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the gut from the humanities, the social sciences, and the experiences of people with gut conditions, while also staying in conversation with the biological and medical sciences. In particular, the Collection will build a platform for emerging hybrid fields—such as medical humanities, environmental humanities, multispecies studies, disability studies, and science and technology studies—to be in conversation with each other through analysis of the gut. The Collection aims to better theorise the gut and its relationship to modernity, with an emphasis on how modernity affects the gut (e.g., nutrient availability of highly processed foods) and is affected by it (e.g., chronic illnesses that disrupt everyday experiences).

Research is invited on a range of themes, including but not limited, to humanities and/or social sciences perspectives on:

• Shifting meanings of the gut and gut health, including causes/prognoses for dis-ease
• Historical origins and current uses of the concept of ‘the gut microbiome’
• Discourses of probiotic, pathogenic and commensal microbes of the gut
• Qualitative methods and ethnographies of the gut
• Guts in relation to gender or gendered expectations
• Guts in literature, across histories and geographies
• Guts and environmental exposures
• The gut in psychology and psychoanalysis
• Human waste and modernity, especially with regards to hygiene narratives
• Embodied experiences of the gut or (chronic) gut conditions
• Human-microbial relations as mediated by the gut, including the vagus nerve
• Clean eating or rhetorics of purity
• Technological interventions into the gut, including DIY tactics and practices
• Metaphors, semiotics, lineages and critiques for understanding metabolisms in premodern, modern, and postmodern frameworks

We particularly welcome contributions from history, literary studies, anthropology, biology, disability studies, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, multispecies studies, cultural studies and film studies, and critical nutrition studies. Clinical research will be judged out of scope.

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 3.