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Short abstract:

This paper examines the practices of fermentation at a natural sake brewery, with focus on how the brewers come to know microbial life through approaches they call “not high tech.” The paper compares modes of knowing (temperature versus chemical analysis) in relation to who needs the data and why.

Long abstract:

Sake is an alcohol made entirely of rice, comprised of several fermented ingredients like koji and shubo. Throughout its brewing process, brewers must continually assess microbes to determine next steps.

This paper examines the practices of fermentation at a natural sake brewery in Japan, because they rely exclusively on endogenous microbes (called kura-tsuki kin). Since brewers do not add purified or known strains of microbes, the brewers must continually suss out what microbes are doing, where, and to what degree. The paper focuses on the epistemological question of how the brewers come to know microbial life through approaches they call “not high tech.” In practice, they primarily use thermometers and sensory cues to detect, measure, and monitor microbial activity, and often act on this information alone. Crucially, the brewers content themselves with this kind of knowing enough. Against this backdrop, regular assessments are made in their chemical assessment room to report to tax regulating authorities.

The paper compares modes of knowing (temperature versus chemical analysis) in relation to who needs the data and why. It calls upon ethnographic and praxiographic field research over the course of two brewing seasons to analyze how the brewery makes sense of microbes, attending to the discussions about who can know microbes and how. These epistemological—and political—questions matter especially in the face of policies such as HACCP, which are being promulgated and enforced throughout an increasingly globalized marketplace. Rather than pit scientific knowing against embodied knowing, this paper offers a middle ground.

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Short abstract:

Through political ecology of Japanese pickles, this paper examines knowledge politics of microbes in the past 150 years. Recent case studies of tsukemono producers and fermentation enthusiasts reflects practices of fermentation as a space for grounding an alternative epistemology and ontology.

Long abstract:

The paper examines the political ecology of tsukemono or Japanese pickles as a launching point to explore the knowledge politics of microbes and fermentation. Tsukemono making has undergone tremendous changes in the last 150 years driven by imperialism, industrialization, and globalization. Institutional feeding had a large impact on them as Japan’s industrialization and militarization since the late 19th century necessitated cheap and durable foods to be fed to factory workers and soldiers. The tsukemono use by military and large-scale textile factories transformed the once-localized and craft production of tsukemono. The post-war technological shifts in canning, packaging, and flavoring have also changed the way tsukemono was made, transacted, and consumed. Retail landscape and consumer attitudes also shifted to frame microbial liveliness of tsukemono as undesirable characteristics. Technical knowledge of pasteurization and heat control of microbes enabled certain kinds of tsukemono to dominate the market that are not fermented, acculturating consumers with different taste and sensory profiles. Yet in the last several decades, fermentation enthusiasts are also exploring different ways to do science that move away from Cartesian dualism. I will discuss more recent case studies of tsukemono producers and fermentation enthusiasts who are using fermentation as a space for grounding an alternative epistemology and ontology. Drawing on the idea of “awai” or in-between, I theorize such mischievous interventions emergent from embodied practices and experiences of fermentation.

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Short abstract:

Historically, the socio-technical system of sugarcane vinegar displays intricate human-microbe relations, where networks of human and non-human stakeholders co-evolves.The Fermentation relies on traditional and experiential knowledge and grassroots innovations to sustain the local microbial economy.

Long abstract:

Microorganisms and humans have a tortuous history together in the larger context of the biological and socio-technical system. Many cultures have traditionally used microorganisms in fermented foods and drinks like sugarcane vinegar. The fermentation process is carried out by local amateur fermento using sugarcane microbes. These practices are akin to the nineteenth-century ‘small cultures’ of science in that amateurs or non-experts are involved in the production of knowledge rather than passively consuming ‘scientific knowledge.’ We interacted with the different actors involved in the process and observed multiple fermentation sites in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India, using an exploratory and descriptive research methodology. We look at how human-nonhuman interactions shape amateur fermento knowledge and the microbial economy in sugarcane vinegar production. In vinegar processing, no modern technology, no scientific understanding, and informal innovative methods or grassroots innovations along with cultural beliefs are practiced, which makes human-microbe relations intriguing at various levels. First, although the microbes make vinegar, most traditional fermento need to be made aware of the microbes' world; they cannot even see them. They do not have access to scientific know-how and equipment to observe microbes. Second, traditional vinegar makers often indirectly know microbes through socially constructed benchmarks of quality: taste, thickness, duration of vinegar fermentation, and feedback from peers. The everyday lived realities and previous experiences of traditional fermento often shape their relationship with microbes. Finally, the socio-technical system, which co-evolves a network of many stakeholders, including bacteria, fermento, doctors, vendors, and consumers to sustain local microbial economy.

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Short abstract:

Drawing from our practical experience in applied hologenomics and food fermentation, this paper explores what it means to sense and make sense of microbes when they are inherently part of our sensing apparatus as holobionts.

Long abstract:

Increasing access to molecular and genomic technologies have spurred interest in uncovering the entangled relationships between microbial life and all living entities. The holobiont perspective, in which living beings are reconceptualised as symbiotic assemblages of macrobial and microbial life, is reshaping fundamental scientific concepts of the constitutional unit of organisms. This relational and contextual perspective offers an opportunity to re-examine not only biological boundaries, but also broader disciplinary and methodological ones that shape knowledge production.

Through engaging with knowing as a form of sensing, we are interested in ways that we, as holobionts, make sense of and with microbes. Drawing from our practical experience in microbial ecology, applied hologenomics, food science and food fermentation, we will reflect on the limitations encountered through different scientific approaches to ‘sensing’ microbes, illustrated by the study of fermented food ecologies. Marginal but growing research across the natural and social sciences is also demonstrating how the sensing ‘subject’ and the sensed ‘object’ are often materially co-constituted, especially in the context of food, eating, and tasting. Bringing the holobiont perspective to bear on these two epistemological observations, we will explore what it means to sense and make sense of microbes when they are inherently part of our sensing apparatus.

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Short abstract:

Based on my ethnography of a soy sauce brewery in the Netherlands, this paper sheds light on knowing and comparing microbes in relation to their surroundings.

Long abstract:

Based on my ethnography of a soy sauce maker in the Netherlands, this paper explores the concept of “comparison as knowing.” Soy sauce, or shoyu, was imported from Japan to the Netherlands around 1800. Nowadays, the fermented, umami-rich liquid is an increasingly popular seasoning in Dutch kitchens. This paper focuses on a small-scale maker founded in Rotterdam several years ago as the first European soy sauce brewery. The artisanal brewery is called “Tomasu,” based on the Japanese way of pronouncing Thomas, the first name of the founder. Thomas Uljee runs the company with three colleagues using a process they describe as “from soil to bottle”. One of his colleagues, a farmer, cares for the soil and grows soybean plants and wheat in a field 30 kilometers south of Rotterdam. Thomas applies koji, a mold, to the soybeans, then ferments the “moromi” (a mixture of koji, wheat, soy, and salt) in whiskey barrels for two years. Thomas started making soy sauce in his own way, after he learned a simple recipe in the U.S. He already had a basic knowledge of how microbes (such as yeast or koji) behave as a baker. He then began exploring how to create better, richer flavours and aromas, always comparing methods with traditional Japanese ways of making soy sauce. This paper traces how the brewery compares their own practices with Japanese artisans, tools, beans, recipes and so on. By doing so, this paper sheds light on knowing and comparing microbes in relation to their surroundings.

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Short abstract:

This paper highlights the algae farmers’ daily rhythmanalysis on the marine microbes, as a process of creating ethical and aesthetic criteria and enhancing their eurythmic abilities to adapt and survive climate change, focusing on the lifecycle of brown algae, crucial for aquaculture in Japan.

Long abstract:

Climate change has led to the emergence of numerous "unfamiliar seas" along the North-Eastern Pacific coastlines in Japan, places where culturally and economically iconic fishes such as salmon have been missing for years. Fishers are adapting and exploring new ways to survive by incorporating new species from warmer seas and already domesticated species. As they seek enhanced resilience and economic competitiveness into these neo-seascape communities, they are actively engaging in updating their experiences and relationships with their seas’ material socio-ecological metabolisms.

These new relations bring new ethical challenges, including establishing boundaries for human intervention that ensure these adaptations benefit both humans and non-humans and promoting new ecological regimes that are either preferable or, at least, not worse than the current, degraded realities.

This paper highlights the fishers’ daily rhythmanalysis (cf. Lefebvre 1992) of marine microbes, as they create new ethical and aesthetic criteria for human interventions, in brown-algae aquaculture in Japan. Historically, these fishers have used the verb “waku,” or “fountain", a word that captures life rhythms and which describes a metamorphosis of microbial lifecycles, themselves affected by control of non-human systems like weather and tides; inorganic to organic; non-living to living; invisible to visible. Combining fishers’ empirical knowledge and advanced science-technology for observation and simulation, such as environmental DNA analysis, enhances their eurythmic abilities to recognize microbial polyrhythms and other non-humans. In these ways, they can promote ecological survival and socialization across species and shape new ethical and aesthetic criteria for living with “unfamiliar” seas.

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Short abstract:

The paper examines the politics of knowledge in matsutake cultivation in Japan, focusing on (1) how humans translate fungal life; and (2) how scientists translate lay knowledge. It addresses the dilemma of agricultural sciences shaped by the legacies of imperialism and extractive industrialization.

Long abstract:

The development of mycology illustrates the complex entanglements of cosmopolitan technoscience and vernacular knowledge. While fungi are ubiquitous and play a significant role in shaping the lives of diverse species, they appear to be “enigmatic” and “elusive” to the modern scientific gaze. The amateur enthusiasts’ skills in finding mushrooms and farmers’ tacit knowledge about fungi’s ecology have contributed to the development of scientific knowledge about mushrooms.

This paper traces the “artificial cultivation” of the matsutake mushroom, a gourmet mushroom highly valued in Japan. While matsutake cultivation has been attempted for over a century, it still poses many “puzzles” to scientists. As an ectomycorrhizal mushroom, which forms a complex symbiotic relationship with living host trees, the matsutake evades human intention to control its reproductive ability in the laboratory. Yet, some farmers and citizen volunteers are successful in conditioning forests to produce matsutake mushrooms. The paper examines the process of “translation” in matsutake cultivation projects. “Translation” here is twofold: (1) interspecies translation of fungal life by humans – both by scientific experts and non-scientific experts; and (2) intra-species translation of various knowledge among scientists and non-scientists. By tracing the translation process, the paper discusses the dilemma of agricultural and forest sciences shaped by the legacies of imperialism and extractive industrialization. The paper also addresses the analytic potential of “translation” in examining the politics of knowledge among various ontological and epistemological traditions.

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Short abstract:

Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork among Brazilian astrobiologists at the AstroLab, the first research facility devoted exclusively to Astrobiology in Brazil, I seek to analyze how these scientists and their microscopic interlocutors negotiate knowledge about life on Earth and possibly beyond.

Long abstract:

War of the Worlds is considered one of the first science fiction novels ever written. Published at the end of the 19th century, its plot revolves around a coordinated attack by our planetary neighbors, the Martians, and their inescapable defeat by “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put on this Earth”: the microbes that populate the oceans, inhabit the soil, float in the air, as well as those that thrive inside human bodies.

More than a century later, in the scientific reality of laboratories and research facilities, microorganisms of various domains and genres ─ bacteria, cyanobacteria, algae, and even yeast ─ are studied as analogs to possible extraterrestrial life, including on Mars. These tiny earthlings are currently at the center of astrobiological studies, and as Stefan Helmreich has put it, serve as “proxy aliens” for scientists who scrutinize present life on our home planet in order to frame life elsewhere and elsewhen.

Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork among a group of Brazilian astrobiologists, which took place at the AstroLab, in São Paulo - Brazil, I seek to foreground the contact zones in which these scientists and their microscopic interlocutors come together. How do they approach and understand one another? How do they tell the desirable and the undesirable apart? And how does it inform Astrobiology’s pursuit of cosmic connections? I, therefore, propose to analyze the knowledge negotiated through their activities and how it might shape our understanding of life as a more-than-terrestrial affair.

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Short abstract:

Drawing attention to temporalities and rhythms in the constitution and knowability of microbial communities in intertidal zones, this paper asks what emerges, beyond anthropocentric frames of time, when ways of knowing become attuned to the interlocking of bio- and geo-rhythms of microbes.

Long abstract:

Coastal microbial mats are sun-light driven consortia of microbes often found in intertidal zones, where they provide a protection against erosion. Diverse functional groups of microbes interact to form multispecies ecosystems that some researchers liken to a macroscopic living entity. The close coupling of these diverse microbial groups is achieved through the cycling and recycling of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur. Circadian rhythms enable cells to coordinate their physiology with cyclical changes in the environment such as Earth’s light/dark cycle. This paper explores how microbial mats become differently legible through the attention to rhythms that require scientists to adhere to carefully timed sampling protocols. As the primary producers in microbial mats cyanobacteria have been observed to impose their daily rhythms onto the rest of the microbial community through the rhythmic release of metabolic products (Hörnlein et al 2018). The forms of life that emerge in these muddy encounters literalize the notion of life as a “sentient symphony” (Margulis & Sagan 1995). Drawing attention to temporalities and rhythms in the constitution and knowability of microbial communities in intertidal zones, this paper asks how these microbial rhythms interact with human experiences, scientific measurements, and earthly cycles. In other words, what emerges, beyond anthropocentric frames of time, when ways of knowing become attuned to the interlocking of bio- and geo-rhythms of microbes in intertidal zones?

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Long abstract:

Centuries of industrial production and decades of global economic exploitation have deposited anthropogenic waste in soils around the world, posing a significant risk to human and environmental health. Extant technological methods such as gas and liquid chromatography or atomic spectrometry can suitably detect soil pollution but are dependent on time-consuming and expensive expert labor—making widespread sensing difficult for many affected communities. In response, a novel area of technoscientific research using microbial and technological agencies together has emerged from numerous scientific and engineering disciplinary contexts. While STS scholarship has investigated the social dimensions of microbial science, for example, synthetic life and more-than-human sensing, a gap remains in the literature about microbial detection of soil pollution science and sensor technology development. This emergent multidisciplinary topic teems with onto-epistemic and ethical diversity concerning how researchers approach and negotiate microbial and technological agencies in sensing assemblages. Drawing on participant observation with an interdisciplinary team developing a microbe-electronics hybrid for detecting arsenic in soils and ethnographic interviews with other biosensing researchers, this paper provides a preliminary view of the disciplinary, material, and epistemic organization of the nascent technoscience of microbial sensing. Further, this paper sketches the differences between two emergent research dispositions. One approach works to functionalize microbes and inscribe them as reliable parts of a greater whole in a technological sensor. And, conversely, others seeking to develop biohybrid soil sensors as a novel expression of microbial and human agencies which require a more holistic approach to enrolling their microbial collaborators.

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Short abstract:

Lactic acid bacteria, once just ferments, are now mainly seen as probiotics, initially defined as growth stimulators, then health enhancers. This proposal focuses on the historical requalification of this scientific object in agronomic and biomedical research in France between the 1970s and 2000s.

Long abstract:

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) were linked to the probiotic concept in microbiology since the 1970s. This concept, anachronistic during Metchnikoff's era, when he called lactobacillin “ferment”, “microbial medicine”, or “microbe”, similarly applies to most biological work throughout the 20th century that characterized LAB by their fermentative action. These suggest LAB evolved from fermentation agents to entities called probiotics, defined in 1965 as microbial growth stimulators, then in 1974 as microorganisms in interaction with human host health. How to understand this evolution?

STS has employed the probiotic concept to signal a shift in cultural practices, challenging the traditional view of microbes as threats. This paper studies these entities, suggesting that their properties should not be taken for granted, as there are part of a dynamic process. I describe this, following Stéphanie Ruphy, as “layered pluralism”, comprising reasoning styles that ontologically enrich an object with new classes of entities. This proposal calls for greater attention to how scientific activities have led to a reevaluation of LAB, focusing on their microbial properties.

From a study of laboratory practices, using archives, interviews and bibliometrics, I argue that the requalification of LAB coincides with a multidimensional restructuring of laboratory activities with genomics’ emergence and the support from dairy industry, serving as a premise for a new category: the microbiome. This analysis reveals two forms of technical reductionism in the configurations of microbial entities, through genomes and cultured strains, both rooted in a productivist perspective of probiotics as vectors for biotechnological solutions, which frame knowledge construction.

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Short abstract:

This communication reports about how seeing-like a vector of microbes enables to consider the ontology of microbial knowledge from an ecology of heterogenous entities from land to lab and lab to epidemiology.

Long abstract:

The Xylella fastidiosa bacterium was discovered in Italy in 2013, where it was responsible for the destruction of thousands of hectares of olive trees. The bacterium is spread from one plant to another by sap-sucking biting insects which, when feeding on a contaminated plant, pick up the bacterium in their mouths and retransmit it to a healthy plant. The study of this bacterium and its insect vectors in Europe is therefore very recent from a biological and epidemiological point of view. Interdisciplinary research, carrying out experiments on the insect vectors of Xylella fastidiosa in ecology as well as laboratory studies, has led to the analysis of the infra-politics of epidemio-surveillance system of this bacterium. Mobility of microbes thanks to vectors is a key challenge for those who – seeing like a state- realize in practices the politics of sustaining plant health. Microbes considered as undesirable because of their impacts on plants are often less considered than the vectors that enable their mobility. Because, scholarship in STS has not much explored laboratory life and scientific practices in relation to biosecurity from an eco-health-perspective, this communication reports about how seeing-like a vector of microbes (meaning a precise ANT description of the translations from insects-in-the-wild to insect-in-barcoding) enables to consider the ontology of microbial knowledge from an ecology of heterogenous entities from land to lab and lab to epidemiology. Questioning the boundary between microbes and plant request to make visible the existence of vectors from an eco-health perspective.

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Short abstract:

This paper navigates the intricate terrain and knowledge politics of microbial life by discussing microbes’ dual role as both threats and allies to (human) health. I ask how different microbial knowledges are enacted, produced and negotiated in strategies against antimicrobial resistance.

Long abstract:

Microbes profoundly influence life on and around Earth, embodying both peril and promise. On the one hand, they can cause pandemics, drive antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and thereby pose existential threats to modern medicine. This dystopian vision and the associated knowledge contrasts sharply with an emerging narrative that perceives microbes as indispensable allies to health, on the other hand. The exploration of the microbiome unveils a plethora of microbial contributions to (more-than-)human health, challenging conventional perceptions of pathogens.

My paper discusses this double logic of microbes as pathogens and health agents and the way they shape scientific knowledge production and societal imaginaries. Key to the investigation is the recognition that diverse assumptions about microbes and microbial practices shape knowledges around health, illness, life, and death. To explore the intricate interplay of knowledge politics in these microbial paradigms as indicated above, I present two case studies: the first delves into foundational research in molecular life sciences, probing the development of novel treatments against multi-drug resistant bacteria. The second scrutinizes phage therapy, heralded as a revolutionary approach to combat resistances through microbes and thereby opening up a different knowledge dimension on microbes as drugs. Both cases are situated within laboratory environments and offer insights into distinct, but not opposing knowledge formations. Through these cases, I illustrate the production of microbial knowledge politics, particularly highlighting the microbes’ agency in these processes and how they intervene in knowledge practices and politics.

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Short abstract:

While BW seems at first to be a typical Cold War technoscientific exercise, I contend that it is actually a site of intense human-microbe relations. In this paper, I grapple with the idea of “containment,” centering my inquiry around the biological safety cabinet.

Long abstract:

Scholarly work in microbe studies has begun to disentangle the complex and rich relations at work when humans engage with microbial life. However, most work focuses on situations where the microbes are in positive or at least neutral relation to human bodies: for instance, the production of fermented foods, the human gut microbiome, or microbial ecologies. What can we learn by turning these insights toward moments where humans and microbes are decidedly not in positive relation? Here, I present a part of my ongoing work on the history of biological weapons (BW) in the United States. While BW seems at first to be a typical Cold War technoscientific exercise, I contend that it is actually a site of intense human-microbe relations. Indeed, BW is perhaps the most extreme case of politics made in/through/with microbial life. In this paper, I focus on how BW is enmeshed with human ideas of biological safety. I grapple with the idea of “containment,” centering my inquiry around the biological safety cabinet (BSC). This piece of equipment, one of the hallmarks of modern technoscientific control of microbial life, emerged out of the American BW program in the 1950s. I follow the history of the BSC, and in so doing address questions such as: What is the nature of containment? What forms does containment take? What contestations arise in a regime of containment that seeks to control microbial life so completely while simultaneously aiming to put humans in very close contact with microbes?

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Short abstract:

This paper uses feminist philosophy to reframe approaches to encountering micro-organisms away expectations of control toward playful openness and the ability to resist epistemic closure, in terms of our encounters with micro-organisms themselves and judgments about what kinds of encounters count.

Long abstract:

This paper uses feminist philosophy to reframe approaches to encountering micro-organisms away expectations of control toward playful openness and the ability to resist epistemic closure. María Lugones’s discussion of “loving playfulness” and Dawn Rae Davis’s discussion of love as “the ability of not knowing” (a form of “loving ignorance”) both suggest modes of encounter in which imperatives of mastery and domination are suspended. Both of these discussions are situated as challenges to Western colonial projects. As Lugones argues, the insistence on a strict ontology of “atomic, homogeneous, separable categories” comes from a European modernity, and used as a “normative tool” in colonizing projects (Lugones 2010, 743). While developed in relation to human contexts, their work can help cultivate an open-minded ability to pay attention to what is actually there while resisting the imposition of our pre-determined and “arrogant” frameworks on microbiomes. Perhaps we can think of encountering microbiomes in Lugones’s mode of playfully travelling to a different “world,” without having to settle on one single meaning or model. This is not merely scientific pluralism, which allows different models to coexist; this is resisting the certainty that any of our models might have, and keeping open our ability to be surprised. This project concerns both our encounters with micro-organisms themselves, as well as judgements about what kinds of encounters count. This openness helps resist ableist and healthist practices of construing microbes as tools for achieving “normality” while also opening up spaces for recognizing different kinds of knowledge.