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Paper short abstract

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.