Paper short abstract:

Interactive workshop followed by discussion and the creation of a microbial sound repository.

Paper long abstract:

Our imaginaries of the microbial world have tended towards the visual since Leeuwenhoek used glass lenses to see ‘animalcules’. The metaphors we use to talk about microbes have become increasingly adversarial since the advent of the germ theory of disease. Recent computational methods associated with laboratory environments have allowed us new ways to imagine microbes as bioinformatic data. However, our awareness of and relationship to the microbial world predates these innovations, and has historically been understood as relational, spiritual and sensory. In this workshop, we want to create the time and space for exploring human-microbial relations through sound. Sensory methods are an emerging area of study in STS: hygiene and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the observation of fermentation practices, or the management of resistant infections in low-resource settings are some examples. The session invites participants to a process that shifts away from the cultural and pedagogical dominance of the visual, giving primacy to sound as a way into a state of being attentive-otherwise. Microbes, like sounds, require particular effort and tools to be isolated from their environments. Through this exercise, we embrace the messiness of sound as a method for a different kind of exploring the microbial and our entanglements with it.Workshop participants will engage in an exercise of attentive listening and recording, followed by a reflective discussion on the potential of sensory methods to research microbes. Recordings from this session will be uploaded to a newly created sound repository– an open archive of everyday microbial encounters.