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Paper short abstract

In this talk, we encounter the human gut as site and substance through which to theorise symbiotic relations. Taking the gut mucosa as case study, I ask how descriptive attention to substance might enrich the granularity of STS vocabularies for multispecies relationality— and modes of care.

Paper long abstract

In this talk, I will invite you down into the scale of microscopic host-microbiota relations to ask how attention to material substance might contribute to STS vocabularies for relationality. The site we will attend to is the human gut mucosal wall: an environment for microbial lives which is simultaneously a layer separating host and microbiota. Drawing on biomedical discourse and scientific imagery, I re-imagine the gut wall as a multispecies interface — simultaneously separating and relating the symbiotic partners. In dialogue with Landecker's apart-together, Latimer's being alongside, and Haraway's becoming with, I argue that the human holobiont, approached at the materiality of the gut wall, emerges as a spatialised collectivity: a (dis)unity whose character shifts with the scale of the gaze. At the level of the human body, symbiotic togetherness predominates. At the granularity of the gut wall, host and microbiota come into focus as being alongside one another: held apart as a condition of healthy relations. This theorisation has consequences for considerations of right care in multispecies relations. Theorising the holobiont as spatialised collectivity foregrounds the matter of how to care for the substance and structure of the relation. Zooming back out to macroscopic relational interfaces, like farms or playgrounds, I ask: how many multispecies relations are sustained not by togetherness alone, but by various forms of alongsidedness? Attention to material structure and substance, I suggest, is one route through which STS might acquire the conceptual and descriptive granularity needed to better care for the multiplicity of multispecies relations.