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Paper short abstract

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.