Paper Short Abstract:

Following a Dutch consortium with disciplines as public health, microbiology, computational science and sociology, I explore how particular modes of ordering (cf. Law) the oral and gut microbiome reflects a situated relating to microbes entangled with multiple enactments of raced and classed bodies.

Paper Abstract:

Along lines of health disparities literature and inclusion and difference paradigms in biomedical research, Public Health's impetus for health for all tends to employ categories of class and race for the recruitment of underrepresented minorities. This is for instance materialized in a Dutch interdisciplinary research project wherein microscopic and micro-sociological inquiries are steered towards raced and classed guts, mouths and bodies of, in this case, babies.

Within an STS and empirical ethics of care understanding, I intend to ethnographically explore this project as a case wherein a variety of techno-scientific, clinical and caring practices can reflect particular modes of ordering the gut and oral microbiome. Such reflections of relating and attending to microbes, as a human species, can then be contrasted with other modes of ordering the microbiome, so to enable a comprehensive valuation and re-inscription of the values embedded.

More specific inquiries will be geared towards the enactments of objects as race and class, throughout various sites - microbiome laboratories, clinics and families in the Netherlands.