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In the citizen science project Taste your Garden, urban gardeners engage with soil microbes through hands-on practices. We analyze whether participation shifts perceptions of microbes from risk to collaboration, reshaping everyday food and health practices and challenging dominant food policy frames

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Dominant Pasteurian ideas portray microbes primarily as threats to be dealt with or eliminated. Yet emerging microbiome research and connected sustainability visions increasingly reframe them as vital partners in ecological resilience, soil biodiversity, and human health. The question remains how this new way of thinking lands with people. Our paper examines how participation in the Dutch citizen science project Taste Your Garden reshapes everyday understandings of microbes in soil, food, and human health.

One hundred urban gardeners plant Norli peas, do the Soil your Undies Challenge, and document their gardening practices through writing and photography. Through these practices, participants might learn new ways of sensing and interpreting microbial connections between soil, food quality, taste, and their own bodies. Urban gardeners are an interesting population, as the roles food producer, consumer and patient intersect in their practices.

We use qualitative and participatory methods, including questionnaires, photovoice probes, and interviews, to analyze how microbes become meaningful through sensory experience, care practices, and everyday garden routines. Our central question is: in what ways does participation shift participants’ ideas of microbes, and how do these shifts influence everyday food and health practices?

Preliminary findings suggest that participants increasingly frame microbes in relational terms, emphasizing ecological interdependence and co-production of health. These perspectives often diverge from dominant policy narratives on healthy food and soil quality, revealing tensions between embodied, experiential knowledge and institutional framings. By engaging citizens as meaning-makers rather than data collectors, this study contributes to STS scholarship on microbe–soil–food–body relations.

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Between 80-90 % of soil processes are mediated by microbes, and farmers are increasingly reconfiguring their practices to care for soil life. It can be challenging to care for worms, bacteria, fungi equally. Differing visions of sustainability affect which (soil) life is prioritized.

Paper long abstract

Agriculture has reconfigured microbial constellations as well as the conditions for microbial life itself. In this paper I present findings from research with grain farmers who strive to improve soil biodiversity in the southeast of Norway – an area characterized by monocultures since the 1950s, with detrimental effects for soil health. A small but growing number of farmers within regenerative agriculture and conservation agriculture are working to reverse this trend. In both approaches, minimized soil disturbance is widely acknowledged as a foundational principle. However, diverging views on what “soil disturbance” actually means affects what sustainable soil management looks like in practice, which soil life is valued, and why.

For example, some farmers eliminate all soil tillage and use glyphosate to end their crops and seed into undisturbed soil. They highlight the importance of the worm species Lumbricus terrestris’ ability to engineer deep vertical tunnels that aerate soil and transport water, and its vulnerability to tillage. Other farmers view pesticides as a form of chemical soil disturbance and instead choose to develop ways of shallow soil cultivation. They emphasize the importance of supporting symbiotic fungi and bacteria, and extend their focus from the root microbiome (rhizosphere) to that of leaves (phyllosphere) flowers (anthosphere) and even seeds.

The “microbial turn” in agriculture is well underway, but the turns go in multiple directions. I argue it is important to interrogate the epistemic, political and economic conditions that shape which microbes are foregrounded or forgotten, subsequently shaping imaginaries and possibilities for resilient natures.

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Situated within the AMR crisis, this paper investigates anti-virulence therapies, which disarm microbes rather than destroy them, as promissory alternatives. It asks whether this approach troubles the paradigm of antibiosis and what it reveals about shifting human-microbe futures in modern medicine

Paper long abstract

The crisis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an existential threat to modern medicine. It has called into question the efficacy of the long-dominant antibiosis (kill-or-be-killed) paradigm, in which microbes are viewed as threats to be eradicated. Against this backdrop, non-traditional therapies have emerged as a key focal point of AMR innovation, including some approaches that seek to move beyond antibiosis.

This paper investigates one such alternative: anti-virulence therapies (AVTs). Rather than killing bacteria, AVTs aim to disarm the pathogenic properties that make humans sick. While AVTs are frequently positioned as emblematic of a more ecological turn in biomedicine, it remains unclear how actors advancing this field conceptualise anti-virulence, both clinically and theoretically. This paper asks how AVTs are articulated as promissory alternatives to conventional antibiotics, by investigating the discourses and practices surrounding AVT research.

The paper (1) maps the diverse set of AVTs amidst the broader turn to non-traditional approaches; (2) analyses the scientific, clinical, regulatory challenges related to their development; and (3) examines how AVT research is entangled with shifting ideals of how humans relate to microbes in the context of AMR innovation.

The paper deploys a mixed-methods approach combining conference ethnography, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), the social studies of microbes, and critical biopolitics, it examines how post-antibiotic futures of human-microbe relations are articulated in practice. It argues that these futures are not merely speculative, but actively shape how innovation proceeds, reconfiguring notions of agency, control and coexistence in 21st-century biomedicine.

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Microbiomes are everywhere, but “the microbiome”—as a phenomenon that assembles a singularity out of microbial multiplicity—exists in discourse. Understanding how this microbiome is situated and related to scientific interests is important to making space for conceptual diversity in this field.

Paper long abstract

“The microbiome” simultaneously does and doesn’t exist. Microbiomes are everywhere, and everywhere unique; we can talk about the microbiome of a specific mouse’s gut or pot of soil, but not a singular microbiome in any less situated sense. And yet “the microbiome” is a real phenomenon in expert scientific discourse as well as popular spheres. At the same time, most microbiome research is not principally concerned with microbiomes but rather some other-than-microbial problem or question in which the microbiome may be an explanation or a solution, a source of heretofore-unexplained variation and new therapeutic target.

My argument in this presentation is that as microbiomes are being studied across myriad empirical contexts, “the microbiome” is being assembled as a discursive phenomenon abstracted from those empirical contexts. On the basis of a mixed qualitative and computational study of scientific publications, contextualized in conversations with microbiome researchers, I suggest that this particular form of inattention to context participates in how microbiome research asks questions around microbial communities rather than asking questions about them. In the context of normative STS interests in sustainability, complexity, and diversity, this is important for three reasons: diverse microbiomes become tacitly patterned after the best-studied (mammalian gut) examples, opportunities for microbiome research to open up ways of thinking about microbial life predicated on studying pure cultures are foreclosed, and the conceptual diversity of the field is made less visible and potentially less valuable.

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The paper analyses microbial-human relations in sourdough assemblages, focusing on microbial work in the setting of artisanal bakeries working with ‘wild’ yeasts and lactic acid bacteria. It highlights the fragile, contested and sometimes unruly relationships between microbial and human co-workers.

Paper long abstract

As human-microbial-environment relations are changing in probiotic societies (Lorimer 2020), microbes are increasingly seen as beneficial and considered desirable co-constitutors of and for human worlds. In sourdough bread-making, yeasts and lactic acid bacteria have long played a central role, although as rather invisible co-workers. Considering changing human-microbial relations, this paper uses both autoethnography and ethnographic material to trace the role of microbial work and the types metabolic and actual labour (Barua 2025) microbes are doing in the making of sourdough bread. By doing so, this paper makes visible microbial-human relations in the context of sourdough assemblages, and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by the conditions of production, consumption and, thus, wider political ecologies. This includes questions that range from the historical and modern use of ‘wild’ yeasts and the techniques and knowledges needed in contrast to working with cultivated yeast, to the socioeconomic impacts of sourdough bread as a trendy product between stylised boutique bakeries and local networks of cooperation and ingredient sourcing. Empirical insights and visual material from artisanal bakeries highlight the fragile, contested and sometimes unruly relationships between microbes and humans as co-workers, and the technologies to capture, tame, and domesticate microbial actors. Focusing on microbial actors as active co-workers and co-creators of human-microbial-environments might allow humans to create more ecologically just and thus resilient natures for more-than-human life.

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The paper analyses how microbes are mobilized for allergy prevention at the science-society interface in Finland. Utilizing the framework of environmentality, it highlights microbes’ multiple framings for health, which range from probiotic killing to symbiopolitical ecosystem modulation.

Paper long abstract

Public health’s relationship with microbes has typically been antagonistic. Efforts targeting pathogenic disease vectors and creating hygienic conditions have dominated policy. Probiotic projects that harness microbes’ protective powers are now emerging due to recent findings of the crucial role of microbes in numerous health conditions. A case in point is allergy. The prevalence of allergies has increased globally, attributed to Western lifestyle, urbanization, and excesses in antibiotic use and hygiene. The current etiological view highlights biodiversity loss and insufficient nature contact as major causes and presents environmental microbial diversity as a key protective factor.

These ideas have been adopted into allergy prevention in Finland. To mitigate the stipulated ‘lack of nature’ for urban dwellers, several approaches are currently in progress, which pave the way for future holobiont public health. They include microbial landscaping materials for urban environments, everyday consumer products containing a clinically tested microbial mixture, and urban development and landscape planning to increase greenness and biodiversity.

Based on assemblage ethnography at the science-society interface, I analyze these approaches to microbial allergy prevention as forms of environmental government (‘environmentality’) of health, which rely on different operations to render microbes serviceable. These operations range from inactivating microbes for safety to building beneficial environments for them to thrive. Microbial environmentality of allergy thus spans between the paradoxical figure of probiotic killing and symbiopolitical modulation of ecosystem dynamics. There are thus multiple framings of microbes in the allergy field, which further illuminates their situated and relational character.

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Due to the pluribiotic nature of the microbial world, any human intervention involving microbes will have unexpected consequences. Using the example of the use of phages to combat fire blight in orchards, we will seek to understand how to think and act while seriously considering these consequences.

Paper long abstract

The differences between the temporalities relevant to understanding microbial worlds and those specific to humans led me in previous work to develop the notion of pluribiosis, which emphasizes the transformative capacity of relationships between living beings. While we need categories to think about and act on the world, these categories are merely crystallizations at a given moment in time of ever-fluctuating relationships and entities that are constantly evolving. In my presentation, I would like to return to one aspect of pluribiosis, namely the idea that whatever plans humans have for microbes, there will always be unexpected consequences. How, then, can we think through the prism of the unexpected effects of our interventions? I will draw here on the description of a specific case: the use of bacteriophage viruses to combat the bacterium Erwinia amylovira, responsible for fire blight in fruit trees. In line with my previous work on the use of phages in human health and alternative drug development models, I will reflect on what it means to think and act from a given situation, taking into account the microgeohistories of the multi-specific relationships that exist in orchards. While some orchards can undoubtedly be defined as plantations, how can we propose responses that do not perpetuate current approaches and practices?

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Human gut microbiomes of semi-nomadic yak herders in Bhutan are shaped by the herders’ shifting environments, dwellings, and activities, entangled in an arrangement of heterogeneous interdependencies, which contribute to diverse gut microbiomes strengthening resilience in more-than-human health.

Paper long abstract

The semi-nomadic yak herders of Laya in Northern Bhutan seasonally migrate with their yaks and horses across different altitudes and socio-ecological environments, being entangled with shifting food-related activities and human-animal interactions, affecting eating habits and microbial circulations. As food is the predominant element in shaping gut microbiomes through the socio-ecologically patterned nourishment of microbes, ingestion of toxins, and circulation of microbes into and out of the human body, we delve into the arrangement of different aspects related to food and the ways in which this more-than-food arrangement enables the entanglement of the socio-ecological environment with the human gut ecology, illustrating a sheer microbiosocial interdependency. Drawing upon anthropological fieldwork among this Himalyan community and nutritional surveys, and sampling and sequencing of stool samples in the EATWELL project, I elicit the socio-culturally and ecologically patterned circulations and inter-actions of humans, animals, microbes, foods, and horses across socio-ecological environments and their influences on the human gut microbiomes of the semi-nomadic yak herders. I also elicit how seasonal variations in migratory patterns and food-related practices shape these inter-actions, affecting the diversity and resilience of the human microbiome and shaping human health as interdependent with other-than-human health, in short affecting more-than-human health. The study of the malleability of the human gut microbiome as entangled with its shifting microbiosocial environments holds lessons for understanding current transformations in food systems and environments and how they affect more-than-human health, as well as for how to strengthen more-than-human health resilience through gut microbiomes in this world of interdependence.

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This paper situates microbial relations within antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in west African soils. Soil and soil microbes are points of bio-geo-chemical interaction— sites of the transfer and spread of AMR. AMR research can benefit from understanding soils as a connective multispecies medium.

Paper long abstract

Within environmental antimicrobial resistance (AMR) research, it is argued that the use of biocide antimicrobials such as insecticides and pesticides can contribute to the spread of AMR. Further, that environments potentially high in biocide use and microbial life, such as soils, are through-sites for the transmission and spread of AMR, a major global human health threat. What is little discussed in AMR literature is the materiality of soil – including its bio-, chemo-, and geological components – as a relevant site of AMR emergence, evolution, and transmission. This paper draws on multiple strands, from One Health environmental AMR science to the materiality of soils and social study of microbes, situating the scope of environmental AMR onto biocide use in its interplay with soils in agricultural and household contexts in Benin, West Africa. Drawing from qualitative interview data from spaces at the nexus of human-animal-environment and biocide use – households (including outdoor areas), market gardens and garden suppliers – this paper Illustrates that soils become more than just surface byways but mediums in which biological, geological, and chemical materials pass through, interact, and affect one another in the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance. This paper rethinks more-than-human elements in the context of AMR spread and flow. Relevant to developing environments resilient to AMR, this paper provides a theoretical-empirical framework that connects AMR, a human health issue, with the materiality of human-affected soils.

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This paper rethinks human-microbial relations through phage-bacteria “coopetition.” Drawing on more-than-human theory, it shows how phage therapy relocates ecological relations into clinical settings, reconfiguring human, microbial, and environmental assemblages as dynamic and situated.

Paper long abstract

This paper mobilizes the phage-bacteria relationship to rethink microbial resilience through a situated and relational lens. Bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacteria – offer a compelling empirical niche for this reconceptualization, particularly in the context of antimicrobial resistance, as their dynamic co-evolution with bacterial hosts both shapes and is shaped by ecological, clinical, and evolutionary pressures. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s more-than-human analytics, I conceptualize phage–bacteria dynamics as sympoietic processes unfolding within specific environmental niches – soils, waters, human and non-human bodies – and reconfigured when mobilized in clinical settings.

I propose the term “coopetition” to capture the relations between bacteria and phages. Phage therapy translates these relations from their “natural” ecological niches into biomedical settings and ultimately the human body. This relocation does not simply transport a microbe; it reconfigures an entire relational assemblage. Because phages are highly host-specific and locally adapted, therapeutic application requires attention to situated microbial ecologies: the bacterial strain, its environmental history, and the patient’s microbiome. The body thus emerges not as a bounded container but as an ecological niche continuous with broader microbial worlds.

Following the movement of phage-bacteria relations from a lake’s changing ecology to the human gut, I show how novel therapeutic practice foregrounds the relational and ecological character of microbes: Interventions reshape microbial assemblages and generate new evolutionary dynamics. Attending to the situatedness of phage-bacteria ecologies enables a reimagining of human-microbial-environment relations, in which resilience emerges from negotiating dynamic, historically shaped microbial worlds rather than from attempts to separate humans from them.

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We explore the partial commensurability between microbial ecology and Colombo-Panamanian Kuna “shamanic” understandings of the body, the environment, and beings inflicting infectious diseases such as malaria and a mumps-like disease unrelated to MuV, and explore emerging infectious diplomacies

Paper long abstract

It starts examining perplexed biomedical efforts to translate Kuna understandings of malaria (which involve an elephant-like master of alligators but no mosquitoes), showing the shortcomings of One-Health-style approaches to non-Western knowledge, which are often reductionistic, instrumentalizing, and antagonizing. It proposes considerations for taking other knowledges seriously: a) Engaging ontologies, b) validating epistemologies, c) most importantly, reframing to address community interests, and d) acknowledging challenges to “western” perspectives. Kuna ontology describes how organisms and the environment are “holographically” constituted and permeated by multitudinous beings that have bodies, require nourishment, and reproduce. Some of these beings protect specific animals, plants, or places by inflicting specific infectious or mental diseases, i.e., pathogens. The master of alligators is also the master of specific swamps. Given that Kuna epistemology emphasizes subjective experiences, we explore means of phenomenological access to the microbial world and how they align with descriptions of the malaria master. Consulting with the community, we refocus on sacred sites: when plans for a national road cross the sacred site of the master of mumps materialize, road workers are afflicted by the disease, Westernized and Kuna ontologies turn out to be partially commensurable, as the national health system acknowledges bouts of an unidentified fever syndrome. The road was completed, the workers left, and the outbreak ended. Years later, the road turned the area into a scenario of a mass-scale human trafficking crisis, calling for a closer look at how more-than-human infrastructures. But also, suggesting sacred sites challenge Western approaches to pathogens, offering diplomatic alternatives.

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This presentation explores how microbial water toxicity becomes a public issue shaped by relations among bacteria, infrastructures and regulations. It analyses how safe and risky water are defined and disputed, and what unequal forms of human–bacterial cohabitation emerge in damaged aquatic settings

Paper long abstract

The aim of this presentation is to explore how microbial water toxicity is configured as a public problem at the intersection of bacteria, infrastructures and regulations. Drawing on an ongoing PhD project in three sites of contaminated water management (a public research institution, a rural queer community space and a municipal wastewater management in a large Spanish city), toxicity is approached not as a biochemical given but as a disputed effect of situated human–microbial–environmental relations.

Building on scholarship on the hydrosocial cycle and environmental justice, biocultural ethics and work on toxicity as atmosphere and relational field, the proposal analyses regulatory documents, water-quality reports and technical materials that define “acceptable” bacterial thresholds in water. These devices produce multiple situated waters (laboratory, normative, well, network) and authorise particular institutions to decide which waters are toxic or safe, and for whom, often reinforcing socio-environmental inequalities.

The communication focuses on two of the three empirical niches. In urban treatment plants, bacteria, sludge, pipes and aeration tanks form alliances to “eat” contamination, reconfiguring microbial life as both risk and allied resource within large-scale aquatic infrastructures. In a rural queer community space, filters, wells and municipal fountains organise infrastructures of care around potentially contaminated waters, redistributing exposure through everyday practices of fetching, filtering and sharing. Following Haraway (1994), this presentation asks which microbial and human lives become sacrificial in the name of water safety, and what respons-abilities emerge when co-habiting with damaged aquatic environments without the promise of purity.

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This paper revisits labs as empirical sites, focusing on how microbial innovations build "resilient food systems" in a trans-disciplinary research consortia of Stockholm. It focuses on microbial time, theorises (a)synchronicities of human-microbe lifeways, and re-imagines lab ethnographies in SSM.

Paper long abstract

Microbes are increasingly called upon to mitigate environmental crises in the Anthropocene, through the likes of engineered biofuels, cellular agriculture, and reclaiming food waste. Yet, as scholars from STS and Social Studies of Microbes (SSM) note, different frameworks of time affect how research gets conducted and thus the kinds of conclusions drawn (e.g., Schrader 2010). This paper examines microbial innovations aimed at building "resilient food systems" in the context of a Stockholm-based, trans-disciplinary research consortia, with particular attention to microbial time. Specifically, the paper will attend to more-than-human timescales, timekeeping, and synchronicity, attending to the tensions between the hands-on material practices that take place in laboratory settings and the discursive talking points about the microbes being developed as environmental interventions. Based on preliminary experiences of a long-term laboratory ethnography, and with comparisons from regionally-specific discourse analysis, the paper will discuss the temporal enactments of microbes alongside their assumptions, dissonances, and material stakes. By scrutinising the epistemic practices of microbial knowledge "in the making," the paper will nuance microbial ontologies beyond bio-objects to manage but as timings to negotiate. As such, the paper’s contribution at a conceptual level will be in theorising the (a)synchronocities between human–microbial lifeways in the context of "resilient" futures. At a disciplinary and methodological level, the paper will also contribute to the re-imagination of laboratory ethnographies in SSM, and the roles they can play in constructing situated, more-than-human knowledges.

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Microalgae has the potential to harm and to heal, to suffocate or to oxygenate. This paper explores the curious ambiguities of microalgae in relation to the techno-scientific narratives that announce its recent emergence as a ‘sustainable solution’.

Paper long abstract

Microalgae is an ambiguous actor in the making of socio-ecological worlds. It has the potential to harm and to heal, to poison and to feed, to suffocate aquatic organisms and to provide carbon sinks for oxygen-dependant species. Over the last ten years, the diverse aquatic species of microscopic, unicellular living organisms, also known as microalgae, have been increasingly put to work as a ‘sustainable solution’ for a multitude of contemporary socio-ecological challenges. Scientific and technological narratives celebrate the transformative potentials of microalgae, for instance, as ‘omega 3 solutions’, facilitators of a circular economy and useful photosynthetic microorganisms in carbon sequestration. Taking a closer look at the hype, this paper traces the recent techno-scientific narratives of an emerging algae sustainability regime and situates them within the curious ambiguities of a microalgal world. By doing so, it examines the cultural conditions under which micro-algae comes to be a new green technology, and questions the neat picture of sustainable solutions. This enquiry into the representations and discourses that currently dominate an imaginary of sustainable microalgae production, prepares the ground for an affect-informed and sensorial ethnography on how this latest green technology impacts local communities, ecologies and microalgae species themselves.

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This paper presents findings from an interview study with Australians about their understandings and practices related to immunity and the microbiome. The findings address how notions of immune selves, immuno-diversity and immuno-privilege relate to ideas about personal and ecological microbiomes.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents findings from a qualitative interview study with members of the Australian public of diverse ages and geographical locations about their understandings and practices related to immunity and the microbiome. It explores how both beneficial and pathogenic microbes are understood to play a role in individual and planetary health. The study is sited within social theoretical perspectives on human-microbial relations in an era in which immunitary politics have become fraught sites of contestation, environmental devastation is contributing to the emergence of novel pathogens as well as disturbing planetary microbiomes, and misinformation and anti-public health sentiment are widespread. Participants were asked about how they defined the phenomena of immunity, microbes and the microbiome, the practices in which they engaged to strengthen their immune system responsiveness, what microbes they identified as beneficial or ‘good’ for their health and which were pathogenic or ‘bad’, and how they conceptualised their own personal microbiomes as interlinked with that of broader ecological microbiomes. The findings identify the meanings that the participants attribute to human-microbial encounters, individual immune system strength, measures such as vaccination, medications such as anti-virals and antibiotics, and consuming prebiotic and probiotic foods. The ways that these meanings and practices contribute to notions of immune selves, immuno-diversity and immuno-privilege in relation to immunitary politics and are structured through lived health experiences and biographies of illness together with socioeconomic attributes such as gender, age, ethnicity and location.