Andrea Núñez Casal
Andrea Núñez Casal was trained in biology and cultural studies and her work examines the entanglements between microbes, embodiment, and inequalities. She focuses on (1) the cultural studies of microbiota and immunity in relation to race, gender, and class and (2) advancing feminist decolonial approaches and embodied methods to rethink health inequalities and devise plural origins and actual shapes of Buen Vivir (good living). She is a Margarita Salas Researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at the Spanish National Research Council (IFS-CSIC) and at the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC). Recent publications include Feminist para-ethnographies: a proposition for a ‘critical friendship’ between embodied experiences and microbiome science (2021) and It begins with us: on why our embodied experiences matter in the disappearance of worlds (2021).
Bachelor of Biology (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela), Masters´ and PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London), Andrea Núñez Casal is an inter/transdisciplinary researcher of the entanglements between microbes, embodiment, and inequalities.
Andrea’s interdisciplinary training has allowed her to explore a variety of social topics and empirical sites in contemporary biomedicine (microbial ecology and immunology) in the Republic of Korea, Brazil, the UK, and the US. Funded by ‘la Caixa’ Foundation, her Ph.D., The microbiomisation of social categories of difference: An interdisciplinary critical science study of the human microbiome as the re-enactment of the immune self, examined how human microbiome science reinstates an immunology of inclusion and exclusion through the ‘biologization’ of social categories of difference (race, gender, and class in particular). It was the first study on the topic.
Andrea has been Associate Professor in the Cultural Studies Department, Goldsmiths, University of London (2014-2020), and postdoctoral researcher in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies, The University of Edinburgh, (2016-2017) and in Genetics and Society, Center for Socio-Legal Studies, The University of Oxford (2020-2021). Her research has also been funded by Obra Social la Caixa (2013-2015), The Wellcome Trust (2019) and The Institute of Science and Society, The University of Nottingham (2020). She is part of the research team of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) “Antimicrobials in Society” (AMIS), the network of the European Commission Sonar-Global and the Commission on Gender and Women Studies (CGWS) in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
Since January 2022, Andrea is a Margarita Salas Researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society of the Institute of Philosophy at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and at the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC). Andrea works also as a Collaborating Professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), in the Interuniversity Master’s Degree in Planetary Health (UOC-Pompeu i Fabra-ISGlobal), in the areas of Social Sciences and Humanities. Ongoing projects include Microbiologies Multiples and ¨GERMEN: Gender, Microbes, and Buen Vivir¨, a multi-sited interdisciplinary research examining the entanglements between women and microbes as key to resurface the transgenerational knowledges-practices and embodied experiences of microbial healing developed by women healers and their subsequent imprint on contemporary microbiological research, popular and profane healing practices.