Paula Palanco is a medical and environmental anthropologist with a background in development studies and communication. She has completed an Advanced Masters in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies in KULeuven (Belgium) and worked in LSHTM, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford. She is currently doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu (Finland), researching human-microbial relationships in the context of alternative agriculture.

She has carried out research in different African settings, working to cover one of the gaps existing in the historiography of drugs: the arrival and generalisation of antibiotics in East Africa. She has also researched the evolution of the global management of typhoid from hygiene to vaccine-centred policies. Currently, she is working on understanding the dynamics of human-microbial relationships beyond antimicrobial use,  through the case-study of alternative agriculture in Finland.

Paula is interested in more-than-human relationality, concretely in the tense relationships that involve microbial worlds. She is also interested in unveiling the underlying infrastructures that shape people’s behaviour towards antimicrobials, the application of anthropological perspectives to public-health policies and the “One Health” approach.

Read more about Paula and her work here.

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