4S/EASST Panel 114 – Multispecies rhetorics in microbial worlds: How do microbes and humans affect each other?
Interested in how microbes and humans get along together? Please submit an abstract to panel 114 for the upcoming 4S/EASST meeting in Prague this August.
In this session we wish to engage with communication between microbial and microbial worlds, and delve into the question: how do macro and micro worlds become available to one another? This session is inspired by the broad shift towards microbial sociality. Microbes are becoming sociable, as foregrounded in microbiome studies, and engineerable, understood as modular machines that can be tailored to particular functions. Recognizing the presence and essential functions of microbes in nearly every environment, microbe-human relations become important not only in terms of disease or the human body, but in terms of co-working, ecological, and other “productive” relationships. Simultaneously, microbes are being “harnessed” to do more and different kinds of work.
In this context, we ask: how do humans and microbes communicate and become available to one another? How do microbes affect humans, how do humans become capable of being affected, and vice-versa? We invite critical exploration of how microbes and macrobes become attuned to affect and be affected in productive multispecies environments. We particularly invite attention to microbial agency at scales other than the individual cell and explorations of how communication does not always orient around “the individual” — indeed, how the communicative agency of “the individual” as a material legacy of modernity may be challenged through microbe-human interactions.
We look for the conversation collected in this session to connect theory and practice in how humans and microbes (may) notice and make meaning of one another and, more broadly, to open up possibilities for thinking about multisensory communication across species bounds. We offer that in these times, “we” must consider who we are, who speaks, who intervenes, and who listens broadly to include even the smallest creatures involved in sustaining the environments “we” all share. Papers may want to consider how different technologies, narratives, or life experiences make microbe-human worlds available to one another.
Krzywoszynska, A. (forthcoming May 2020) Nonhuman labor and the making of resources: Making soils a resource through microbial labor, Environmental Humanities
Szymanski, E, & Calvert C. 2018. Designing with living systems in the synthetic yeast project. Nature Communications 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05332-z.
Find the abstract submission platform here: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss20/index.php?&obf_var=9985724&PHPSESSID=2quc0ddn000851iksgigfdo495
Erika Szymanski – Colorado State University – Erika.szymanski@colostate.edu
Anna Krzwoszynska – University of Sheffield – A.Krzywoszynska@sheffield.ac.uk
Erika Szymanski
Assistant professor, rhetoric of science, Microbiome Initiative hire
Department of English, Colorado State University
Erika.szymanski@colostate.edu
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