Negotiated Categories: The Co-Construction of the Tunisian Population in Human Microbiome Science and Its Historical Entanglements

The analysis of the intersection between race and microbiome science is a growing area in the social sciences, but little scholarly attention has been given to how population categories, that often have a racial subtext when applied to the Global South, are constructed, or how they intersect with or diverge from local conceptions of race. Drawing on research on an EU-funded human microbiome project involving Italian and Tunisian researchers, I argue that population categories in microbiome research are not merely imposed, but are continuously negotiated and co-constructed with local, homegrown racial categories.