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- Convenors:
-
Maya Hey
(Centre for the Social Study of Microbes, University of Helsinki)
Salla Sariola (University of Helsinki)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
What STS methods — including tools and methodological frameworks — can detect, document, and make sense of microbes? What are their affordances and limitations? And how can these social scientific methods expand the ways in which microbes are studied? This panel examines situated methods-in-action.
Long Abstract:
What STS methods—including tools and methodological frameworks—can detect, document, and make sense of microbes? What are their affordances and limitations? And how can these social scientific methods expand the ways in which microbes are studied? This panel examines situated methods-in-action.
For centuries, microbial knowledge has developed in tandem with advances in biomedical and technoscientific apparatuses. While scholars of microbial STS have—and can continue to—collaborate with scientists and laboratories, a broader social scientific inquiry into microbes has come to a point where there is a need to develop our own methodological tools and encourage transformations from within. Given the so-called microbial turn in STS and adjacent fields, an ontological reckoning of/through microbes warrants a critical engagement with methodological questions.
This panel takes up the doing of methods as its problem knot, with attention to how and whether novel methods work in microbial inquiry. The panel brings together two foci: (1) experimental and sensory methods, and (2) practices like fermenting and composting that offer analytical insights of-and-with microbes. Both foci engage with how to go about studying microbes in social scientific settings, with some approaches relying on direct contact (e.g., making pickles, tasting them) for microbes to matter, while other approaches rely on analytical proxies (e.g., non-potable water, an unhealthy body, a fallow field) to indicate microbial presence, their metabolisms, or their transformative effects. With these diverse approaches in mind, this panel decenters laboratory studies, as well as anthropocentric, eurocentric, ocularcentric, and verbocentric modes of engaging with microbes.
We invite paper presentations, but in the spirit of doing methods otherwise, we also welcome multimodal formats (e.g., embodied and experiential workshops, demonstrations of in-progress prototypes, on-site/real-time performances) that can be implemented within the time/space of the panel. We are also in conversation with Micropia to plan additional activities on their premises.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Salla Sariola (University of Helsinki)
Long abstract:
When fermenting, what is in the fermentation jar is not just what is in the jar – say, to make pickled cucumbers: salt, water, and cucumbers. What is in the jar is all the things that have given rise to those ingredients. Where did the ingredients come from? Were they grown, purchased, or foraged? Where, and by whom? On which soil, and who owns the land? What are the challenges of accessing materials to ferment with? What are the structures that shape access to the ingredients – knowledge of plants and their medicinal and financial value? To what ends are ferments made? To think about fermentation in this way means thinking about microbes contextually and expansively, exploring the various dynamics that expand beyond the vat.
The analysis of this presentation examines fermentation practices in the Indian state of Assam. This is an area where fermentation cultures are thriving both in terms of consumables as well as scientific research in search of novel microbiome solutions. Here, fermentation practitioners take us on a journey to engage with the cultures of cultures – the social of microbes and the microbes of social practices, documenting varying fermentation practices drawn together across domains as land ownership, spirituality, indigenous knowledge, laboratories…. In this talk, I develop the idea of fermentation as a method – not just for preserving food or exploring how to build more sustainable futures but as a method for social sciences to understand microbes and their significance.
Andrea Núñez Casal (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)) María J Santesmases (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC))
Long abstract:
Starting from the lens of a Galician (North West Spain) experimental ethnographic documentary, Negro Púrpura (2021), along with a recent feature film, O Corno (2023), both with the fungi in the region as the protagonist, we trace and identify a fourfold trajectory of ergot (1) as an ally of women healers and midwives for centuries; (2) as economic sustenance for peasant women before and after the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939); (3) as a lucrative biopharmaceutical for reproductive and mental health research (with the synthesis of LSD in 1938), transgressing the boundaries of the laboratory to become an embodied and sensory part of the countercultural movement of the 1960s in Europe and the United States; (4) as a promising symbionts in the contemporary reemergence of new forms of collective and holistic interspecies consciousness.
Bringing together feminist and decolonial STS with a multimodal approach to the study of ergot-human relations, the paper intertwines historical archives and films with scientific literature and ethnographic data of embodied experiences and mapping on LSD use. We analyse the onto-epistemic, embodied and socio-political significance of conducting a genealogy of the present of ergot: from vernacular women-ergot entanglements to how their erasure was conditioned by the production and circulation of lucrative biomedical substances in the pharma industry; from experimental biochemistry to its reemergence in today´s ¨Psychedelic Renaissance¨. In doing so, we argue that the long durée of women-ergot entanglements is tangible in today´s psychedelic spiritualities and mystical experiences and reverberates in contemporary visual and embodied culture.
Isabel María Gómez Rodríguez (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC))
Long abstract:
Antibiotics are closely linked to microbes. They not only stop their growth and expansion, but are in the first place produced by them. It has been through antibiotics as research tools that microbiology, as a scientific discipline, has been able to interact with bacteria to a large extent. Conversely, bacteria have also become laboratory tools for the study of antibiotics. This paper aims to address the social and political assumptions that give meaning to microbiological research. To this end, it focuses on the research carried out by Spanish women microbiologists on antibiotics and its resistances during the eighties and nineties. At a time when antimicrobial resistance was becoming a public concern due to the fear of losing the scientific and normative way of relating to infections and the microbes that cause them, microbiological research practices offer a good starting point for thinking about social relations with microbes. The experimental detail of methods such as screening and bioprospecting of bacteria, surveillance of resistant strains, and tracking and characterization of R-plasmids are spaces to interpret clinical and social relationships with bacteria; moreover, they are spaces to acknowledge the female scientists who contributed first line to microbiological research by touching, observing, and thinking microbes.
Maria Debinska (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Long abstract:
Physarum polycephalum is an acellular slime mould, which at a certain stage of its life cycle forms a plasmodium that can span tens of centimetres. The fact that despite its simple structure it exhibits complex behaviours and performs complicated tasks, combined with a relative ease and safety of its cultivation, turn it into an epistemic thing that traverses disciplinary boundaries between biology, art and computer science. Physarum not only travels between science and art labs, but also makes their boundaries porous and prone to contamination by concepts and narratives that are brought in from other contexts.
This paper discusses the ways the slime mould shapes the field of ethnographic fieldwork as well as the ethnographic research methods by drawing the ethnographer into an already existing network of experimenters hailing from various disciplines;inary contexts. It starts with a recurring first contact narrative that I share with my research participants and goes on to describe my own experiments with Physarum, which lived in my kitchen and was my sole research participant for most part of the Covid19 pandemic.
I argue that cohabitation with the slime mould and the necessity to adjust to its rhythm of growth and movement was a research method in its own right, yielding insights into the temporal and environmental conditions as well as ethical ramifications of slime mould-human relations. It also affected my relation to and position within my ethnographic field by turning me into one of Physarum experimenters.
Riina Hannula (University of Helsinki)
Long abstract:
Microbial Medi(t)ation is simultaneously a practice, fieldwork, and subsequently the name of the paper. It aligns with the ways companion microbes are made known within the vagus nerve science. Recent scientific research has shown that neurochemical communication of the microbes via the vagus nerve affects brain chemistry and mood. Lay practices and therapeutic exercises suggest that the so-called vagus nerve activation provides overall well-being to immunity and mood by restoring ‘rest and digest mode’ of the nervous system. Microbial Medi(t)ation audio exercise situates in the gap between facts and claims on the vagus nerve and their embodiment. This immersive artistic practice has served as a platform for speculative thinking-feeling. It encourages the participants of the study to create knowledge along with their companion microbes in an embodied way, moving on yoga mats and breathing deeply. Participants are interviewed about their vagal and microbial experiences after doing the softening exercise with speculative invitations to imagine what it is to be a holobiont, human-microbial consortium.
Technoscience shapes how we conceptualize and materialize human-microbial relations. I explore via embodied and sensory doings how we know about and ‘know with’ microbes that signal to our brain via the gut-brain axis. I ask what possibilities open up for our sensory landscape and governing our well-being when we employ a more sensuous understanding of the microbial agency within the gut-brain axis. To address this, I combine STS and art-based research employing Microbial Medi(t)ation to think and feel with microbial companions.
Faidon Papadakis (Centre for the Social Study of Microbes, University of Helsinki)
Long abstract:
What is “the microbe” beyond the controlled environment of the lab, the pure culture and the sequenced genome? How does the microbial change, and what are the implications of the frictions that arise between different ways of knowing it, from biology to everyday practices?
In this presentation, I will consider the microbial within the context of urban gardening, drawing from ethnographic research in Athens, Greece. Placing it among a number of indeterminate and unruly forces that come into play in urban gardens, from weeds to cats to insects, I will argue that the relationship with the microbial in this context is paradigmatic of attitudes towards knowing, doing and dwelling in the city that involve a letting go of control.
In their modernist conception, cities and gardens mirror the lab as spaces where the master of the craft –the city planner, the gardener or the scientist – overlooks, surveys and controls. Yet cities and gardens (at least) are sites where this mastery is commonly resisted. In urban gardening, the microbial resists the determination that produces “the microbe”. It is always-already in assemblage, in multiples, inextricable from other bodies and mediums. Gardeners know it in such forms as compost, soil and plant disease. Engaged-with yet illusive, perceived yet unfixable, the microbial in urban gardening can be illustrative of a departure from knowledge-as-control and of a desire for a different way of being in the city.
Maya Lane (University of Amsterdam)
Long abstract:
This work explores how the self care practices of those living with chronic vulval infection- focusing on eating, cooking and cleaning practices, offer a multi-sensory, embodied, at home and easily accessible methodological approach to microbial ethnographic research. Attending to the specific methodological challenge of studying microbes as invisible and often undetectable beings, this paper advocates for ‘with-nessing’ (Atkinson et al, 2021) microbes through chronic illness self-care. It argues that specific forms of human-microbial intimacy are developed when living with a chronically infected body; microbial imbalances through infection are often manifested sensorially through discharge, bad smells, pain, rashes or gurgles. As such, through attending to the embodied effects of microbial infections, we can start to ‘with-ness’ microbial relations and transformations within the human-microbe body.
This paper draws on ongoing fieldwork in the Netherlands with people living with chronic bacterial vaginosis and chronic vulval candida, two common and yet difficult to ‘cure’ microbial infections. Many people turn to selfcare or DIY remedies to help in healing, including eating practices, diets and cleanses, with the sensorial embodied effects carefully watched, noted and measured. Through an exploration and journey through these practices, this paper will highlight how coming to ‘know’, ‘understand’ and ‘care for’ microbes translates into everyday life and ethnographic research. Furthermore, this work highlights not only how we can come to ‘know’ microbes, but also what microbial entanglements can teach us, such as how they come to act as a catalyst for re-evaluations of what constitutes a ‘good’ and ‘natural’ life.
Anna Sigrithur
Long abstract:
The measurement and documentation of flavours of fermented foods is a methodological challenge for many reasons, not least of which is subjective perception. Flavour is a synthesis of tastebud sensation and retronasal olfaction, with aromas making up the vast majority of variation in flavour. While fermented foods have hallmark taste qualities, oftentimes the key desired flavour of the food is aroma-based. In their vast recombinant diversity and still-mysterious pathways of cognition, aromas are by far the most challenging of the sensory properties of a food to name, document, and reproduce. This project intercepts a set of methodological problems about measurement by asking a question arising not from food science but from archival studies and media studies: how might flavours and smells be documented and encoded for future sharing and use? In an ongoing research-creation project, I have been experimenting with manners of archiving and documenting scents of ferments using scent itself as medium, rather than using measuring proxies relying on other senses. Using the ethos of low-tech and accessible methods which is rooted in my background as a community worker and cook, I experiment with DIY methods of archiving and encoding scents of fermented foods. My methods involve different approaches to concentrating and distilling scents of ferments, ‘printing’ then concentrated scents on cards, and sealing in the aromas for storage. Potential use cases for olfactory prints include providing sensory training on the stages of a ferment’s desired stage of completion, documenting experiments, and maintaining an archive of projects.