Pandemic imagineries of interspecies relatedness. More-than-human microbial methods on the bus

Abstract

Over the last two decades, social and economic anxieties associated with antimicrobial resistance, food and zoonotic disease risk, as well as the recent pandemic, have prompted a surge in social and cultural studies of the microbial and the human biome. Human existence is always a more-than-human achievement, with its urgent need for further development of more-than-human methods that support sensing, understanding and ‘doings’ with microbial worlds. Amidst calls to develop new techniques that ‘allow us to engage with diverse and multiple worlds and non-human agencies’, this chapter advances a more-than-human microbial methodology, using the example of public health videos created during the recent pandemic. Taking the lead from geography’s ‘creative turn’ in research methods, the more-than-human microbial methodology presented here draws on three bodies of literature: filmmaking as research; affect theory; and artistic microbial methods. The main portion of this chapter is framed around a conversation that took place on the video calling platform Zoom between co-investigator and artist-academic Paul Hurley and co-investigator and landscape scholar Charlotte Veal in April 2022 as part of the project Routes of Infection, Routes to Safety: Understanding Risk and the Viral Imagination on Public Transport. Deliberately dialogical, the chapter raises questions about how stories of the trials and tribulations of research, particularly in fast-paced and fluctuating socio-political and scientific contexts, are told. Lightly edited, the format is also intended to be provocative and free flowing, creating a reflective exploratory space to think about and push thinking on more-than-human and microbial methods.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Paul Hurley: orcid.org/0000-0002-8964-5774

ORCID for Emma Roe: orcid.org/0000-0003-4674-2133

ORCID for Sandra Wilks: orcid.org/0000-0002-4134-9415

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