HealthXCross

Project

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 known is how, in this process, new cultural concepts and practices of health may emerge. The ERC funded project HealthXCross asks: how does health come to be reconfigured in a world entangled through microbial data?

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The Microbiome

Between 50 and 90% of the cells in a human body are microbial. The composition and activity of the microbiome are central to human processes such as metabolism, weight regulation, immune system structure and function, allergic reactions, and even personality and mood. Human activities such as diet, birth, antibiotic use, and interactions with other humans and animals shape and change the microbiome, just as these microbial communities shape and change their human hosts. Health, therefore, can be seen as a property emerging from an ecosystem, so dislocating the anthropocentric view.

The microbiome ecosystem provides information on how environments, humans and microbes are inextricably entangled in ongoing processes of life. For a bit more than a decade, cutting-edge computational methods (metagenomics) have been available for studying in vivo microbial communities, opening a window into ‘who is there’ and ‘what they might be doing’.

The study of the microbiome offers an entry point to the understanding of different ecosystems and issues such as human nutrition and chronic diseases, plants’ nutrient acquisition and stress tolerance, soil and aquatic environments’ stability, regional ecological disruptions, reductions in agricultural productivity, the degradation of waste matter, poor soil health, global climate processes, or the conversion of natural materials into renewable sources of biofuels or energy.

Main Research Question

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.

HealthXCross asks:

how does health come to be reconfigured in a world entangled through microbial data?

Participatory nature of the project

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. Taking inspiration from the microbial world, HealthXCross is committed to create symbiotic processes of research collaboration with technoscience and other disciplines.

Aim

The project aspires to offer timely insights into the interplay between knowledge making and changing health practices in times of profound ecological, socio-technical and economic transition. HealthXCross’aim is to advance anthropological understandings of the contradictory but constitutive aspects of living together and being in relation.

Fieldwork

HXC team members Roberta Raffaetà and Lucilla Barchetta virtually travelled to Aarhus Universitet on the 6th of January 2022 to attend the "Workshop on digital anthropology. How can we study digital infrastructures ethnographically?", a workshop organised by Maja Hojer Bruun (Aarhus University) and with Hannah Knox (University College London) as a guest presenter.

Our postdoctoral fellow Lucilla revisited her ethnographic journey in digital research consortia for One Health and shared her ethnographic doodles. She conceives them as tools constituent to reflexive discourse and writing, created and discovered in the give and take of ethnographic research, in all its unpredictability and immediacy.

Sketchbooks taking shape during fieldwork, illustrations presenting anthropological materials and drawings used in collaborative research approaches have often been sidelined by other visual practices and still constitute a questionable category in academic discourse, notwithstanding the growth of the field in recent years.