Dialoguing with indigenous epistemologies, such as the Lenape of the United States, Davis begins by analysing the presence of plastic in the environment, its effect on bodies and how Western infrastructure makes this invasion invisible. Plastic and its toxicity, as well as its creativity, is a planetary event associated with the idea of an evolutionary techno-scientific notion, the industrial revolution, the expansion of capitalism as an ontology, the capitalocene, the anthropocene. These abilities of plastic as a non-human agent unfold in other different ways, of which the ones raised so far concern the development of diseases such as certain types of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, or bacteria that feed on plastic. Plastic, Davis teaches us, is part of an infrastructure that is invisible to the eye until it begins to overflow everywhere.

How is lead related to social, economic, biological and technical processes in certain communities? Elizabeth Roberts shows us that lead influences culture and daily life in working-class neighbourhoods in Mexico City. However, the health problems are attributed by the interlocutors not to lead toxicity, as public health advocates, but to pesticides. Through "bioethnography", a method that combines approaches from the social sciences such as ethnography and the life sciences such as long-term biomedical studies, this seminar draws our attention to the inequalities embodied by disadvantaged groups in Mexico City, such as the toxicity ingrained in food due to the abusive use of agrotoxics.

Traditional peoples and indigenous populations have been systematically portrayed as defenceless victims of climate change in debates about sustainability. In the United Nations' 2030 agenda, with its 17 sustainable development goals, for example, they figure as populations whose cultural heritage and physical survival need to be protected by governments and multilateral agencies. Against this trend, it is noteworthy that one of the 2022 reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognises the value of indigenous knowledge and recommends that it be integrated into the co-production processes of environmental governance, including participatory modelling and climate services. But how is indigenous knowledge integrated into these policies created by Western scientists? Renzo Tadei shows us, through an analysis of the IPCC and the knowledge generated on climate change, that indigenous knowledge has been acclaimed in conservation discourses, but has not been used correctly.

In the Yanimami Indigenous lands, humans, animals, and the environment have suffered from the territorial devastation caused by mineral exploration since colonial times. In this Seminar Series, Dario Kopenawa, a Yanomami indigenous leader, denounces the vicious effects of illegal mining in indigenous territory that has caused illnesses as well the death of animals, plants, rivers, people and their cultures. Kopenawa highlights the effects of mercury contamination on the environment and criticizes former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s government for this sanitary and humanitarian crisis and its devastating consequences.

This episode explores the Conquest of Mexico from a multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on Multispecies Anthropology and Eco-evolution to understand the historical events of 500 years ago in today's American Continent, highlighting the introduction of non-native species by Europeans and their impact on indigenous ecosystems and societies. Based on work presented by Anna Tsing and colleagues, through the "Atlas Feral", it reflects on how interactions between humans and other species have shaped history and ecology. The concept of the "patchy anthropocene" is introduced to suggest that human impact is patchy and localised, with specific significant ecological consequences. Finally, the idea of "niche construction" is proposed to analyse the co-evolution and adaptation of species through time, providing a broader perspective on human influence on the environment, before and after the Conquest.

In the context of the Brazilian meat industry, a violent grammar, catalyzing asymmetrical relationships in highly unhealthy environments, operates behind an ideal of economic growth. The meatpacking plants that have invaded Brazil are based on often hidden ways of operating structures of inequality, such as poverty, racism and discrimination, which negatively impact the lives and well-being of human and non-human populations. Based on multispecies ethnography, the analysis proposed by Segata allows us to expand the idea of the affected population beyond human beings. Segata asks about our choices (or what we have available as a choice) or How is the way we eat fuelling the end of the world?

This seminar session covers the content of the Medicine Anthropology Theory special issue edited by the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene collective and with the participation of contributors.

Non-anthropocentric conceptions and ways of life of the Ashaninka people from the Peruvian and the Brazilian Amazon, centre on the idea that soil, water, air, plants, animals, humans and the universe form a whole continuum where life, death and time flow; life is everything and everywhere; and life is deeply spiritual and sacred. The speakers propose the concept of "cosmocentrism" to explain it and venture the idea that it is the destruction of this principle in Capitalism and the Wstern world that has permitted the progressive destruction of our own planet. They also show how the Ashaninka have creatively adapted to the contemporary world making global connections and alliances to protect their ways of life, the Amazon forest and the planet itself.

This seminar proposes the idea of colonial metabolism to understand how rural Malawian communities adapted their food systems the mid 20th century and what the consequences of this might be in the contemporary context of food insecurity, and agro-industry practices. It draws attention to how practices of colonial extraction must be situated in wider socio-ecological dynamics that include slow violence and adaptation.

What does industrial agroforestry in the Santo Tomé region, in Brazil's bond with Argentina, have to do with the spread of Covid-19, fires and social inequalities in the region? Combining a feminist anthropological perspective and concerned with showing how the emerging agribusiness-driven technique creates environments and offers other forms of social exclusion, Andrea Mastrangelo analyses the environmental catastrophes, such as the fires, that have ravaged this region of Argentina, showing how the modification of the local biome and the introduction of biotechnologies in favour of agribusiness has resulted in fires, but also in syndemics, droughts, river floods and a decline in the supply of food and water. The era of the Anthropocene reveals how industry based on exploitation appropriates biological processes in favour of capital accumulation, as if nature were doing unpaid work, just like women.