Short abstract:

In this paper, we consider how care is enacted across species and scales using the case of the microbiome. Increasingly, the microbiome is recognised as a potential site of intervention and care. But whether this heralds new collectivist potential or traditional biopolitics remains unclear.

Long abstract:

In this presentation, we consider how care is enacted across species and scales using the case of the human microbiome. Increasingly, the microbiome – consisting of trillions of microbes that exist within and upon us, and which influences almost every aspect of health and wellbeing – is recognised as a potential site of intervention and care. But how care manifests at the microbial scale and how caring for the microbiome features in individual and collective endeavours to optimize human health remains unclear. On the one hand, the multiplicity inherent in the microbiome heralds collectivist potential and a relational vision of care that is rarely as evidence in other health domains. But on the other hand, the microbiome is also deployed in more individualized ways as a site of self care – as a novel technology of the self – which can simultaneously perpetuate the long-standing disciplinary logics evident in more well-established biopolitical imperatives to secure and maintain one’s own optimal state of health and wellbeing. Drawing on data from a broader program of research on human-microbial relations in the context of everyday practices of informal care, this analysis focuses on the perspectives of: 1. parents and carers for young children, and; 2. University students who are currently studying microbiology to explore the paradoxes emerging around the microbiome as a site of (self) care.