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.