With-nessing bacteria

Abstract

This article addresses more-than-humans in ethnography by focusing on embodied encounters during fieldwork with the help of concepts such as relationality, being with, and with-nessing microbes. Through an ethnographic study of a diarrhoea vaccine trial in West Africa, we discuss how the more-than-human body is diffracted in clinical trial practices and how those diffractions are traced by social scientists. In some research contexts, diarrhoea-causing microbes are inevitable companions during fieldwork, creating bodily consequences and novel modes of relating to humans and nonhumans. Here, paying attention to our own experiences of co-existence helped us to ask more nuanced questions about the many ways microbes are known. When attuned to our own relationalities with microbes, we could see the open-ended, pluralistic orientation to relationality with the more-than-human and the body multiple in biomedicine.