233042 SE Microbes on the Mind: Studying and intervening in the promises of microbiome research (2024W)

Until recently, medicine has seen microbes as primarily disease-causing agents; a threat to life and health. In the last twenty years this view has been increasingly challenged, with new research showing the complex and essential roles that microbes have for humans, non-humans, and the environment. In this expanding field of discourse, hype about the promises of probiotics to cure everything from digestive disorders to depression has developed in tandem with fears about the rise of antibiotic resistance. More recently, claims of novelty have been critiqued by highlighting traditional and non-Western practices of fermentation and agriculture. STS informed perspectives on microbiome research are expanding - from Heather Paxson’s description of 'microbiopolitics' to Jamie Lorimer’s description of a 'probiotic turn'. And scholars from sociology, art, and philosophy have used microbes to highlight our collective, multispecies interdependence and issues of equity, whilst warning against ‘individualising’ and commercializing microbiome science. The COVID-19 pandemic brought many of these tensions into sharp relief. As discourses tangle together and slip past each other, how we depict and describe microbes is key representation matters.

In this course we will investigate how microbiome research might shift understandings of our bodies, our health, and our situatedness, and unfold the role of communication in these meaning-making processes. In the first session we will survey microbiome research over the last 20 years, and set up a framework for critical science communication and discourse studies. We will then examine a range of discursive themes by pairing communication case studies with academic texts from STS, cultural studies, and science communication studies. Themes will include how microbiome research has been taken to challenge binary categories of nature/culture, human/non-human, and body/environment; promissory language and the potential for ‘cruel optimism’ (from Lauren Berlant); and ‘missing mess’ in depictions of microbes. Case studies will be drawn from popular media, as well as exhibits, artworks, and a podcast produced by Medical Museion the University of Copenhagen’s Museum for the past, present, and future of medicine (www.museion.ku.dk) where the course teacher Louise Whiteley is based.

Throughout the course we will reflect on questions about intervention and ethics: If we see problematic representations, should we as researchers attempt to change them? When does description become normative? How can we support the development of the futures we want to see, whilst also being humble about our ability to imagine them? During the second half of the course, students will develop their own proposal for an intervention in microbiome communication, which we will share and discuss on the final day.