Digestive Belonging, Trans-Species Sensing & Care in America’s Dairyland

About this episode

Katy Overstreet discusses the concept of 'digestive belonging' in relation to raw milk and multispecies interactions in agriculture.

In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care. Her main ethnographic fieldsites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States, and various sites in Denmark including pig farms, an insect farm, and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katy has worked with a lot of different co-species social formations and technoscientifically modulated ways of living and dying in agriculture, and in today’s episode, she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows, and humans in raw milk consumption, production, and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katy gave on the day…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Katy Overstreet

Topics covered

• multispecies ethnography
• environmental anthropology
• farm animal welfare
• raw milk consumption
• microbial ethnography
• agriculture
• foodways

Keywords

• digestive belonging
• raw milk
• multispecies
• environmental humanities
• foodways
• agriculture
• microbes
• farm animal welfare

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Copenhagen, Centre for Sustainable Futures, BSAS seminar series

Places: America’s Dairyland, Denmark, midwestern dairy worlds

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