Living with microbes

How to develop theoretical and practical understanding of new forms of microbial living? Moreover, what in fact is microbial living? Some members of the trailblazing project Microbial Lives visited Saaren Kartano in November 2024 to take a look back at the collective effort bringing social study of microbes into Finland – in all its weirdness.

Origins of microbial lives: building the lineage of social study of microbes

Microbial Lives was born with the diversity of human-microbial relations in mind. The beginning of the 21st century produced a series of revindicated scientific claims that situated microbes at the centre of many human concerns such as health, immunity, food, and biodiversity. Furthermore, microbes’ usual characterization as threatening pathogens came into question as research in the microbiome showed that many microscopic beings were in fact crucial for the survival of humans, other animals and entire ecologies. These discussions were at the centre of the rationale behind this project as we set out to map how the presence of microbes and their standing as social actors was changing.

Given how closely humans live with microbes and the complexity how we support and threaten each others’ survival, Kone Foundation’s thematic call “Our vital neighbours” was perfectly aligned to enable new research on these new conceptualizations of microbes in social sciences. Microbes were no doubt vital, and our neighbours. In conceptually and methodologically setting up our project, we wanted to acknowledge their quotidian character and the many ways in which they are present in our lives in most unsuspecting manner. To do so required departing from clearly defined study cases to broadening our perspective and seeing what was common in our diverse interactions with microscopic life forms, the many ways we enroll them into human society (e.g. food production), and the many ways they show up unannounced (e.g. threatening pandemics).

The project funded a number of scholars and artists: Faidon Papadakis, Viljami Kankaanpää-Kukkonen, Emilia Laine, Kazu Ahmed, Aga Pokrywka (Ferment Radio), Riina Hannula, Oona Leinovirtanen and Tiia Sudenkaarne, with Salla Sariola as its principal investigator and Jose Cañada as a core research group member. In November 2024, Sudenkaarne, Hannula and Leinovirtanen had a retreat at Saaren Kartano to map out the work what we’ve been collectively and individually doing. In what follows, we discuss human-microbial co-existence,  governance of microbes and the ethical questions that have emerged; and mostly remain unresolved, requiring further research. It bears repeating that while only some of us are authors of this blog entry, Microbial Lives is a collective effort of all those mentioned, including more-than-human companions of various kinds.

Ethics of microbial lives

Tiia Sudenkaarne’s microbial living within the project extended from drafting its application in 2018 as PhD candidate from becoming one its funded postdocs as the projects drew to a close at the end of 2024.  To Tiia, Microbial Lives was a first in many aspects. Academically, the project established the field of social study of microbes in Finland. Personally, it was one of the first big project applications she was actively involved in from drafting stage. It saw her moving from one career stage to the next. It provided an intellectual hub and resources for many more people than originally envisioned. This is to be accredited to success of individual projects but is also testament to the originality and appeal of Microbial Lives.  

For Sudenkaarne as a budding queer feminist philosopher, thinking about microbial lives meant an invitation to develop feminist philosophy and ethics from the viewpoint of gendered bodies, microbes, and technology, a daunting yet intellectually inspirational prospect. Bioethics as her specific niche, she had grown interested in feminist new materialism that problematized health and embodiment but also the science that governs them by offering a conceptualization of materiality, discourses, and ethics as entangled rather than as particular domains. Bioethics can be defined as considerations of the moral, societal, and political issues brought about by sickness, health, care, and environment: what kind of ontological assumptions these concepts build on, what kind of knowledges they entail and how should ethical issues around them be resolved. In this constellation, ethics is not simply about responsible actions in relation to human experience of the world; rather, it becomes a question of how each intra-action matters in the reconfiguring of these entanglements, creating space for changing the world that is produced. It demands developing ontologies for the holobiont paradigm:  that we are in fact existing in human-microbial cultures that are based on a philosophically radical account of relationality.

Living with a pandemic

Both the project and living as we knew it came to grinding halt with a pathogenic force majeure as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Finland in 2020. By that time Sudenkaarne had grown interested in antimicrobial resistance particularly in relation to the bioethical principle of justice. As the devastating effects of antimicrobial resistance are most intense in conditions of extreme scarcity, both in terms of human and more-than-human health, the pandemic brought a new tier of closeness to these justice issues seemingly purely matters of health governance. The pandemic offered a gruesome exercise in misguided vulnerability against her by then already developed theoretical framework for the concept building on queer and feminist bioethics. It seriously questioned the Nordic welfare state’s and the global health community’s ability to care for those most vulnerable in an ethically sustainable way, she thought, which added new sense of urgency and direction into her philosophical work.

Grounding a new ethical framework

Working with microbial lives, Sudenkaarne has set the groundings for a new ethical framework for thinking about bioethics. A queer feminist posthuman framework offers new ways of thinking about how different human-microbial cultures come together and into conflict. The conflict is often caused by human exceptionalism that is not only health-related but that only human ways of being are considered moral. While the idea of this type of more-than-human moral worth has been well-established in philosophy and other fields of inquiry, a microbial perspective adds to the complexity of the demands in many ways. We are racking our (gut)brains: how should microbe-human relations be governed to improve health in healthcare systems and policies in a less anthropocentric way for planetary flourishing? This key moral dilemma remains: how to consider social justice, environmental justice and multispecies justice in the same framework while simultaneously also detecting and safeguarding against layers of vulnerability in an intersectional understanding, perhaps including species as one of such intersections?  It is obvious that such a framework requires a new theory of justice, begging the question for a queer feminist posthuman moral theory.

One of the partial solutions we have collectively suggested at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes that grew out of the Microbial Lives project at University of Helsinki sociology is a more-than-human justice orientation that seeks new ways to bring forth ethical issues caused by health anthropocentrism. Thus, living with microbes not only has given rise to new ethical questions such as thinking about antimicrobial resistance from a more-than-human perspective with a justice orientation, but has also revealed a lacuna in both metaphysics and moral theory.   

The art of microbial living: embracing the weird 

When Microbial Lives had already started in 2019, Riina Hannula and Oona Leinovirtanen came onboard as interns – positions that were not in the initial project plan. They were still completing their Master’s theses at University of Turku, Leinovirtanen in sociology and Hannula in media studies. Leinovirtanen contacted PI Salla Sariola who later came to supervise both of their doctoral dissertations. From the onset, Leinovirtanen and Hannula felt like this project was “weird enough” for them, and the reality was even better. As they both have a background in art, they started to explore the themes of the project with an exhibition Mouths and Salivas at Kosminen Gallery 2020, informed by all the new fantastic ideas whirling in the Microbial Lives.  Social study of microbes was a field that Sariola and others in the project wanted carve out, and it needed new methods, concepts, and tools to enable microbial knowledge production along and beyond natural science. Artistic contribution by Hannula and Leinovirtanen was initially motivated by introducing artistic tools to the project while themselves getting introduced to the literature and social scientific research regarding microbes. 

As project progressed, knowing with microbes became materialized via reading circles, workshops with other experts/ artists advancing collaborations in academia in a delightful and curious style. Microbial Lives is not only about humans and microbes coming together and into conflict but brought microbes and humans physically together in a committed way, following the now established approaches in feminist science and technology studies. It started to make sense to perceive the agency of microbes as a co-enactment or co-thinking/doing with them. 

From the gut

In her four years of doctoral research in Microbial Lives, Hannula focused on human-microbial relations within the gut-brain axis, neural network by which the gut microbiota communicates with the brain that impacts our physical and mental health. Hannula asked: How does the emerging science on the gut-brain axis materialize in society and within bodies experiencing them?  What kind of conceptualization of the bodies and their multispecies relations this kind of science gives rise to? The scientific notion of microbial signaling is central information on how to be a holobiont, a human-microbial consortium. Building on this consortium, she explored the phenomenon of microbial signaling with different case studies of co-dependence between different kinds of bodies from different perspectives. This consideration relates to a wider discussion on self-care as a type of multispecies care, where humans are always assembled with their microbes that leak inside out constituting what our bodies are. 

To Hannula, Microbial Lives formed a creative community where she felt supported to do research incorporating methodology from her artistic background. She endeavored to contest human-centered health management that was reinforced even in the probiotic ways of understanding human-microbial relations. She designed her research to create more sensuous knowledge of microbes in the hope of questioning human exceptionalism and to better acknowledge our co-dependence on the surrounding milieus. 

Art for the holobiont

In addition to this creative community and traditional scientific methods, Hannula’s research was conducted partly in workshop settings embedded in the contemporary art scene that has a lot of enthusiasm towards more-than-human engagements. Understanding microbes as agents that change the nature of how we perceive our assembled and relational nature with the rest of the living planet has been developed through artists and art. Our objectives to understand microbial entanglements align with bioart and multispecies art that are also inventing alternative ways to approach biological matterings, and interspecies assemblages. What Hannula felt doing otherwise was to utilize artistic research in a social scientific context that was rich in theoretical and methodological opportunities, still having many gaps to fill. To make space to think about scientific phenomenon in the gut-brain axis from a more embodied and speculative stand, she made different kinds of installations in various solo- and group exhibition during Microbial Lives. Making physical objects and immersive artworks enhanced her PhD research, sometimes providing space for workshops that were part of the research settings, sometimes offering alternative modes of creating knowledge beyond text. 

Thinking with soil

When Leinovirtanen came into Microbial Lives, she had been gardening for a while and grown more and more interested in the knowledge provided by permaculture. From that, her interest has blossomed into PhD research at the concepts and practices of the relationships between humans, microbes and garden soil manifested through permaculture (sustainable) gardening. She’s interested in practices related to microbial activity, such as composting, as ways to generate information about sustainable relationships with the soil and matter. In the metabolism of the garden, soil microbes such as bacteria and fungi play an essential role in decaying organic matter into nutrients for plants. 

Those tiny micro-organisms surely are our neighbors in many ways: we share the same body and live closely in the same garden. Permaculture can be considered part of the probiotic turn due to its microbial practices, which is a way to study how to live together with microbes. She began to look for prebiotic and probiotic practices in the garden. In these kinds of practices, the role of the human is mainly as a facilitator, who is trying to offer beneficial circumstances for microbes to thrive. Permaculture’s pursuit of microbial abundance instead of scarcity maintains sustainable cultivation methods as alternatives to intensive production methods that impoverish the soil.  The probiotic view towards microbes comes into conflict with prevailing cultivation practices that do not enable soil food webs and microbes within them to thrive, for example by wasting resources by removing organic material from the fields without giving anything back to the cycle.

Multispecies metabolism and corporeal communication

To Leinovirtanen, central to permaculture gardening is the concept of multispecies metabolism, both in terms of soil food webs and between humans and the garden. The relations in the garden are material and humans seem to be part of the ecosystem like all other creatures. In a permaculture garden, the co-existence between the ecosystem of a garden and the ecosystem of a body, and their merging together, happens through material relations, like eating, defecating, and touching. Corporeal communication with garden microbes takes place, for example by touching the soil and plants. What we want to touch in the garden and what we do not, can tell us about our latent attitudes towards matters and actors, like microbes. Every touch changes the microbiome, so it matters what we touch: invisible connections between the environment and the organism are formed in touch. Conversely, the microbiome affects an organism’s health and functioning in many different ways. Following Donna Haraway, Leinovirtanen is eager to know more about how organisms connect to a common material world through their bodies, and thus responsibility for the environment is included in the relationships between organisms.

In the end and at beginnings: microbial afterlives

Thanks to Microbial Lives funded by the Kone foundation, we have been able to broaden the empirical diversity of our collective work well beyond what we had initially dreamt. The core group of Microbial Lives has evolved into a lively and stable research community with international ties that continues to expand, not only numerically, but also thematically. And microbes, of course, remain a core member.

Readings

Cañada, J.A., Sariola, S. & Butcher, A. (2022). In critique of anthropocentrism: A more-than-human ethical framework for antimicrobial resistance. Medical Humanities, 48:e16. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2021-012309

Fragiadakis, G. ym. (2018). Links between environment, diet, and the hunter-gatherer microbiome. Gut Microbes, Volume 10, 2019 – Issue 2

Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.

Lorimer, J. (2020). The Probiotic Planet. Using Life to Manage Life. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sudenkaarne, T. (2024). A queer feminist posthuman framework for bioethics: on vulnerability, antimicrobial resistance, and justice. Monash Bioethics Review.  Advance online publication https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-024-00192-4.

Sudenkaarne, T., & Butcher, A. (2024). From super-wicked problems to more-than-human justice: new bioethical frameworks for antimicrobial resistance and climate emergency. Monash bioethics review, 10.1007/s40592-024-00197-z. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-024-00197-z.

Aknowledgments

The authors would like to warmly thank PI Salla Sariola,Tiina Vaittinen, Kazu Ahmed Viljami Kankaanpää-Kukkonen, Faidon Papadakis, Aga Pokrywka, and Jenni Saarenketo for being part of the project at some stage of its life from writing the application to its end. We also thank the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes that continues to harbor our inspirations for work and play.

Authors

Tiia Sudenkaarne, DrSocSci, MA, BSocSci (social work), is a senior researcher in bioethics at University of Lapland. Her work is funded by Research Council of Finland in the project Gendered Ethics of Reproductive Time: Science, Technology, and the Market (ReproTime, PI Riikka Homanen). A queer feminist philosopher, her current work discusses philosophy of time in relation to reproduction: gamete freezing, AI, and gender and sexual variance.  She is also a core research group member at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes (CSSM) funded for University of Helsinki by Wellcome Trust.  There she continues to think about antimicrobial resistance, vulnerability, social justice and gender and sexual variance. She is developing a queer feminist posthuman framework for ethics, including the exploration of possibilities of haunting for moral theory.

Riina Hannula conducts doctoral research in sociology at University of Helsinki. Riina’s background in art enables them to expand methods and theories towards more sensuous and speculative accounts. Their artistic and academic practice stems from multi-species care and produces a standpoint assembling with a more-than-human world. Riina’s work is done in radically relational settings, collaborating previously for instance with goats, micro-organisms, permaculture gardens, and a river ecosystem.

Oona Leinovirtanen is an artist and a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Turku. Her dissertation deals with the relationship between soil, microbes, and humans in Permaculture gardening. She is part of the Center for Social Study of Microbes (CSSM) at University of Helsinki, where she also worked as an artist-in-residence in 2023, making, among other things, a video performance that dealt with the microbial agency of the body, improvisation and gut feelings. Art and science allow for different views of her interests, sometimes intertwining and sometimes competing with each other.

Jose A. Cañada is a multidisciplinary social scientist with an emphasis on Science & Technology Studies (STS). They have developed most of their career at the University of Helsinki, where they earnt a PhD in 2018. Their research has focused on studying knowledge production and material practices associated with socio-technical controversies and a variety of policy issues, working on topics such as antimicrobial resistance, pandemic preparedness, and response, biobanking and the development of water infrastructures. Currently, they study the reconfiguration of more-than-human relations in aquatic environment, with special attention to different modes of knowledge production related to environmental threats to aquatic ecosystems. More concretely, Jose looks at the proliferation of algal blooms in Finnish water bodies and the way interaction between humans and environment changes in the context of the ongoing ecological crisis.