Remaking Health in a Microbial Planet by Crossing Space, Time, Species and Epistemic Cultures

ongoing

Microbiome science is popularizing a symbiotic understanding of health and ecology. What microbiome science now knows is that microbes entangle the health of people and environments; what we don’t know is how, in this process, new cultural concepts and practices of health may emerge. This project asks: how does health come to be reconfigured in a world entangled through microbial data? HealthXCross is a multi-sited, comparative ethnographic study of how scientists produce and coordinate knowledge within interdisciplinary platforms that collect, compare and integrate microbial data across time, space and species in order to produce simulations for intervening in both environmental and human health. HealthXCross is an ethnographic inquiry into the implications of the environment as a body - and vice versa - through analysis of the tensions between the emancipatory and the dystopian effects of dissolving boundaries between human bodies and environments. With this aim, my project will examine how these research platforms 1) remake notions of biological diversity through technology by crossing conventional categorizations (space, time, species) and epistemic cultures, 2) create and emerge from the diverse spacetimes of innovations across the global North and the global South and 3) shape new trends in healthcare and health governance. HealthXCross will create a participatory design with scientists, who are among stakeholders in the public discourse about what it means to be human and how to live in an entangled planet. My project will offer timely insights into the interplay between knowledge making and changing health practices in times of profound ecological, socio-technical and economic transition. HealthXCross will dramatically advance anthropological understandings of the contradictory but constitutive aspects of living together and being in relation.