Short Abstract

The panel explores the situated and relational character of human-microbial-environment relations for reimagining and developing more resilient natures. We welcome contributions from diverse empirical microbial niches, such as guts, bodies, soils, food production, and aquatic and aerial ecosystems.

Description

Microbial life permeates and covers our world, revealing not only its ubiquity but also the porous and fragile nature of human existence. Social scientific research on microbes has historically emphasized their pathological character, putting its focus on infectious diseases, biosecurity and biosafety. The last ten years have seen a boom in the social study of microbes, bringing an empirically diverse and more nuanced picture of how microorganisms – including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and microalgae – interact with humans, nonhuman animals, and broader ecologies in diverse ways. This evolving understanding of human-microbial-environmental entanglements, especially in light of accelerating ecological crises, calls for new conceptual and methodological approaches to the role of microbes in complex ecologies.

At the forefront of such call, STS scholarship has made key contributions to articulate the situated and relational perspectives necessary for studying microbes that make possible centering them as analytical objects without falling into isolating reductionism. This way, case studies have highlighted that the same microbes can emerge in multiple ways, such as pathogenic or probiotic, symbiotic or parasitic, depending on their embedded contexts. In other words, in the broader ecological webs, it becomes crucial to focus on how the microbe comes to be in relation to the conditions that produce it.

This panel explores the situated and relational character of human-microbial-environment relations for reimagining and developing more resilient natures. We welcome contributions from diverse empirical microbial "niches", including but not limited to guts, bodies, soils, food production, and aquatic and aerial ecosystems. We are particularly interested in how microbes and their environments are reconfigured by socioeconomic, environmental, historical, racial, and other contextual forces that often contribute to disarm or reify inequalities both in human and more-than-human ways. Authors are warmly encouraged to engage with novel concepts and methods in the realm of social study of microbes.

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