Remaking Health in a Microbial Planet by Crossing Space, Time, Species and Epistemic Cultures

Project Information

HealthXCross

Grant agreement ID: 949742

DOI

10.3030/949742

EC signature date 2 February 2021

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 28 February 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 367 062,00

EU contribution

€ 1 367 062,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - HealthXCross (Remaking Health in a Microbial Planet by Crossing Space, Time, Species and Epistemic Cultures)

Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The microbiome is the ecological community of microbes that live in, upon and around us humans and affects human health by connecting humans with their environment. Health, therefore, can be seen as a property emerging from an ecosystem, so dislocating the anthropocentric view.

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?
HXC is a multi-sited, comparative ethnographic study of how technoscience is reconfiguring biomedicine and biology - and, in turn, social sciences and the same concept of ‘human’ - by connecting microbial data across time, space and species.

HealthXCross's team members study how microbiome scientists produce knowledge within laboratories which employ various methods to collect, compare and integrate microbial data across time, space and species. The ERC project counts 6 main case studies across 3 different continents and 4 nationalities: one in the virtual space, one in Europe, two in the United States, one in north-Africa and one in the Pacific.

HealthXCross is an ethnographic inquiry into the implications of the environment as a body - and vice versa - through analysis of the tensions between the emancipatory and the dystopian effects of dissolving boundaries between human bodies and environments. We examine how scientists:
• remake notions of biological diversity through technology by crossing conventional categorizations (space, time, species) and epistemic cultures (Research Cluster 'Diversity';
• create new knowledge collaborating with and emerge from the diverse spacetimes of innovations across the global North and the global South (Research Cluster 'Spacetimes of Innovation';
• contribute to shape new trends in healthcare and health governance Research Cluster 'Health').

HealthXCross will offer timely insights into the interplay between knowledge making and changing health practices in times of profound ecological, socio-technical and economic transition, so advancing anthropological understandings of the contradictory but constitutive aspects of living together and being in relation.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Key achievements include publications (6 articles already published, 2 accepted and in print, 7 under review and various in preparation). Lucilla Barchetta and Roberta Raffaetà have published an article in the journal 'Big Data & Society' entitled 'Data as environment, environment as data: One Health in collaborative data-intensive science'. One Health considers health as interdependent across humans and non-humans. Its development is thus necessarily interdisciplinary, posing a number of challenges. Increasingly, technology and big data are seen as the solution to these challenges, allowing to aggregate heterogenous data. This article’s argument is that technology does not solve these challenges alone; in dig data times there is ever more need of dialogue across disciplines. We coin the concept of 'data as environment' to illustrate that data are a structure of contact across ecologies and disciplines. We, thus, address the mainstream criticism that data are self-contained bits, enclosed and autonomous objects, extracted and abstracted from the flux of becoming. The article makes a compelling point by unravelling political-ethical questions embedded in the emerging technoscientific worlds of the Anthropocene and of data-intensive science.
For communication, an animated video for the dissemination of the project's main goal and research questions has been developed. In an engaging and simple way, it invites to think at 'the body as a planet and the planet as a body'. Against an anthropocentric perspective, the video asks 'how can we re-think health as a part of an interconnected environment?' The video ends by featuring which kind of interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists and microbiome scientists is needed in order to tackle this question.
The project has produced many scientific collaborations. It is strengthening, with colleagues both in Europe and in Italy, the anthropology of science and the anthropology of data within projects of public health. The PI has also established research networks with colleagues in philosophy and social sciences in Europe, positioning the peculiar contribution of anthropology within science and technology studies. With microbiologists, the PI and the team have developed collaborations that have resulted in a seminar on ethics, an interdisciplinary seminar on the microbiome, a project successfully funded, a transdisciplinary laboratory and alleged publication on the social impact of science.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Progress beyond state of the art:
- Establishment of a framework for collective work in anthropology: anthropology is currently usually practiced as individual research. The ERC offers the opportunity to experiment forms of collaborations, embracing the challenges that come with it in terms of authorship, organization of time, place and format of exchange. The PI has created appropriate digital platforms and detailed guidelines that have been discussed initially and are iteratively revised. During our weekly meetings we go into depth of each case study in turn while reflecting on overlapping and interconnecting themes. This help us to be open to the diversity of our case studies but also keep a holistic framework and progressively develop a central insight. This will feed a book, currently in preparation, with the Introduction co-authored by all team members; each chapter will illustrate a specific case study.
Expected results:
- insights at the nexus between health governance and the microbiome in the framework of planetary health. Planetary health is a very vague term, yet ever more present. We are ethnographically analysing how it is made in practice in various places, through multiple methodologies, technologies and visions and how all this is informing the development of health governance at different latitudes. Various publications are in preparation on this topic, illustrating the social impact of planetary health in its different applications in different but interconnected geopolitical dynamics.
- analysis of microbiome's methodological visual practices across the analogical and the digital that will better illuminate the political epistemology of the current scientific era. To see is to know, but how microbiome scientists see and what this 'seeing' means in their field is still under-theorized in anthropology. We are working on this and are convinced that illuminating this aspect can open the 'black box' of technology and can be a way to democratize science.
. evolving collaborations with microbiologists: more projects are underway with more laboratories, so we expect to finally have a groundbreaking impact in the microbiome field as anthropologists.

Microbiome HXC