Date and Time: 

Thursday, 19 September 2024 (13:00 - 17:30)
Friday, 20 September 2024 (09:30 - 12:00) 

This two-day roundtable aims to develop critical conversations and stimulations on human-microbe relations to reconsider the compromised categories of the nature-culture divide and reveal opportunities for innovation, improvisation and inclusivity. Focusing on microbial communities and non-bacterial microcosms, including subjects of viral, archaeal, fungal, antibiotic, and other often-overlooked microbial beings, offers alternative perspectives on reflecting precarious futures amid global crises in the Anthropocene.

By unravelling the holobionts, the relations of biological becomings and social life hover at the interstices of presence and absence, race and gender, materials and semiotics, and life and death. Hence, unsettling reductionist and essentialist claims from science arise when human worlds are co-constituted and shadowed by microbial communities.

What are microbes, then? How is microbial knowledge produced, and by whom? Why do anthropologists study microbes? Building on these fundamental inquiries, the symposium sparks the anthropological thinking of microbial beings and sensible methodologies as interventions.

Our objectives are:

1) strengthen the ethnographical exchange of microbial epistemologies to address societal futures across regions;

2) probing the multitude of microbial subjects that have emerged in contemporary crises where imperial-colonial histories abound;

3) exploring the potential and limits of the microbial turn in more-than-human commitments and advancing the theories, methodologies, and ethics in favour of mutually relational, dependent, and dialectical interactive social-bodily encounters.

The roundtable will be a framework to explore the main three sessions:

Navigating the Promises and Perils: Towards a Microbial Turn?
Within Liveliness: Microbial Spirits and Rhythmic Spectres
Visceral Intimacy: Fermenting Holobionts Beside Ourselves

In between, we have an auxiliary visual gallery at the roundtable event as an experimental attempt to invite external contributors from different universities and geographical regions to lead us to the imaginative interfaces of engaging bio-art, sciences and humanities in praxis. The gallery has been named “A Phantasm of touché”, which implies something haunted, the ghostly appearance of microbial beings, and to be surprised by what we envision by touchness, where the touch creates a wounded opening for inviting matters in becoming.

Please register by September 8th by emailing Nga Shi Yeu (shiyeu@socant.su.se).

Confirmed Guests:

Amber Benezra (Stevens Institute of Technology)

   Research profile: https://www.stevens.edu/profile/abenezra

Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter)

   Research profile: https://sociology.exeter.ac.uk/staff/schrader/

César Giraldo Herrera (Ilia State University)

   Research profile: https://anthro.iliauni.edu.ge/en/employees/cesar-enrique-giraldo-herrera_/

Frédéric Keck (Laboratory of Social Anthropology, EHESS)

   Research profile: https://las.ehess.fr/membres/frederic-keck

Joana Formosinho (The University of Edinburgh)

   Research profile: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/joana-formosinho

Joshua Evans (Danish Technical University)

   Research profile: https://www.joshuadavidevans.com/cv

Roundtable