This book examines the material politics of vaccines by looking at their complex biological workings as site of political investigation. It asks how vaccines come to matter, how they relate to, and at the same time make and enact, specific ideas of bodies, immunity, health, and collectivity. Throughout the book, claims and possibilities around what vaccines are, what vaccines do and what they can do rely on an exploration of the empirical practices and relations involved in their production, development and distribution.

The book is written as a series of encounters with vaccines, each one generative of new ethical and political questions. Readers will encounter vaccines as mimetic attempts to recreate natural immunity while also establishing an ambiguous relation to nature; as pivotal points around which multispecies bodies, living and dying, move and converge in the lab problematising human-nonhuman distinctions and dependencies; and as temporal anomalies that mark the body with memory cells that shape, condition and portray specific expectations of futures to come. Finally, readers will encounter vaccines as bodily makers of communities through the phenomenon of herd immunity. Each of these encounters breathe new life into ideas of bodies, biotechnologies, collectivity and protection. Together, they explore the material indeterminacies of vaccines, in their capacity to say something about the politics of living in, with, and through our bodies.

Roberta Pala is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Sydney. Her research draws on Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), multispecies studies and sociology of health. Her work looks at the entangled nature of social and scientific events and considers biological interventions and technological artefacts as material sites of political investigation.