Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We probe new theoretical approaches to care by thinking and living with microbes within the intersections of feminism, posthumanism, and justice in a relational understanding considering how the notion and practices of microbial care could create a more sustainable and just futures.

Paper long abstract

Drawing from case examples of biodiversity (guts) and bioremediation (soil), we probe new theoretical approaches to care by thinking and living with microbes within the intersections of feminism, posthumanism, and justice in a relational understanding. We consider how the notion of microbial care pushes ontological, epistemological, and ethical boundaries with a distinct contribution to the latter to create a more sustainable and just futures. In this focus, we argue for an essential relationship between care and justice in a more-than-human setting that seeks a radical departure from human exceptionalism. With a focus on science and technology studies (STS), we provide a framework that can make claims for more-than-human justice, multispecies justice, and microbial care that aims to be inclusive of diverse human, microbial, and other non-human entities and groups. The paper seeks to compute existing social justice frameworks between groups of people and unfair power dynamics between species in the same framework. We conclude that one crucial way to understand care is to consider it as a practice of justice.

In this presentation, I focus on an example of Agential Guts from a human-goat-soil-microbe assemblage point of view that reconfigures human-microbial relationalities from a situated perspective that imagines more resilient natures. In this experiment, microbial care goes beyond instrumentalising, objectifying, or isolating microbes in an artistic collaboration that embeds my agency with the more-than-human world. In this process, care for and caring in leaky and complex relations require challenging the logics of capitalism that promote technocratic governance of care.