Microbes on the Mind

Since the late 19th century humans have felt like they were at war with microbes. But in recent years we’ve realized that they are important collaborators in health. Not only do they help us preserve food, bake bread and brew beer, but the majority of microbes that live in and on us actually help keep us healthy. With the podcast ‘The Sound of microbes’ we want to explore the many weird and wonderful ways that humans and microbes collaborate.

On July 15th, I had the pleasure of presenting a talk entitled INHABITING THE CONCEPT OF HOLOBIONT: THINKING THROUGH VISUAL IMAGERY at the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology’s first online conference.

On March 4th – 6th 2021, the international conference Chronic Living: Quality, vitality and health in the 21st century took place.

On June 23th 2021, I (Joana Formosinho) had the pleasure of giving a talk at Aarhus University’s Center for Environmental Humanities. The talk was based on my research of how the rise to prominence of microbes within biology and biomedicine, as agents in human health, as co-evolving partners in the making of bodies, is disrupting established notions of biological individuality.

Fermentation for cooking and preservation has old roots and can be found in most food cultures around the world. For a long time, people have chosen what to eat in order to maintain and strengthen a healthy gut. This seems to be a rising trend, with some using diet as a tool for managing a health issue or diagnosis, and an increasing interest in the gut microbiome. 

Text as technology for care and understanding is an upcoming PhD course, asking what ‘text’ is, and how and when ‘text’ matters in practices of education, medicine, care, hybrid art, exhibitions and research. To explore these questions and their implications, we bring together interdisciplinary perspectives to problematize text as technology. The PhD course takes place […]

What happens when we talk about the connection between our gut and psyche? How might such ‘articulations’ change the ways we understand the body, self and health? How can writing down personal memories help us experiment with ‘body talk’? Sign-up here before June 2, 2021 to participate in the research project. PhD student Tine Friis […]

One of the outcomes of the Microbes on the Mind project is a podcast series about our relationship with microbes – more specifically those of them that either live in us or enter us through food.

New publication between art, science and performance studies.

You are a colonizer – and so am I Look around you. What did you touch before opening this blogpost? What are you touching at this very moment? Perhaps you are sitting on a chair, leaning up against a wall, touching your phone or typing on the keyboard in front of your computer. Microbes on […]

One of the driving questions for the Microbes on the Mind project (click here) is how we can represent a more-than-human body; how we can depict, write, feel, perhaps even hear and smell ourselves as partly microbial. We study how others have approached this communicative puzzle, and experiment with different methods ourselves. Since the project […]

The overall theme is to explore the role of microbes as an inherent part of our culture and everyday life. Through four themes: food, parenthood, wellbeing & health as well as microbes in art & fiction, we explore how we live with microbes, how we imagine them and how they affect us