It begins with us: On why our embodied experiences matter in the dis/appearance of worlds

“To ‘de-passion’ knowledge”, writes Vinciane Despret, “does not give us a more objective world, it just gives us a world ‘without us’”(2004, p. 131). In producing ‘knowledge-inpractice’ about our/the ‘body-in-action’ (Mol and Law, 2004, p. 51),“having fun, doing something we do well for the sheer pleasure of doing it” (Graeber, 2014) figures as a form of ‘re-attuning’ and ‘re-sensitising’ ourselves, to re-passion’ our bodies and knowledges. In this short piece, I would like to write about us, STS researchers. I would like to discuss our embodied “significance and agency in the emergence/occlusion of worlds. Usually concealed in the sphere of the ‘private’, ‘quotidian’ and ‘mundane’, I hope to persuade you that your embodied experiences, – always already situated within specific spatio-temporal frames –, matters –, first of all, to you/us, being then crucial for the relationships we establish with our colleagues, ‘‘epistemic partners’ (i.e. informants) and, ultimately, for our discipline(s)

Ways of healing: exploring more-than-biomedical cures as emancipatory and biopolitical knowledges-practices

Healing is loosely defined as the process(es) of becoming well. Despite its all-embracing multispecies quality, social and scientific significance(s) across spaces, times and cultures, there is a lacuna concerning critical ontological and epistemological frameworks of healing, particularly in the areas of Science and Technology Studies (STS), feminist theory and body studies. As an initial attempt to approach these questions and limitations, we organised the open panel Ways of healing as part of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) 2021 Annual Meeting. The panel engaged with local, traditional, and profane healing knowledge-practices as relational and sustainable healthcare approaches as well as biopolitical tools of neoliberal (individual) responsibilisation. By focusing on how to analyse, establish and build on ‘good relations’ between (1) traditional health cultures and biomedicine, and (2) lay and professional expertise, this conference report addresses pluralistic ways of healing in unequal and uncertain worlds

Sustaining (dis)embodied inequalities in the(ir) Eurocene: ancient microbes, racial anthropometry, and lifestyle choices

Racialisation and colonialism are central to sustaining (dis)embodied inequalities. We draw together our distinct ethnographic projects on a microbiome expedition with Amazonian indigenous non/human communities and on medical professionals' encounters with Mbya Guarani communities in the Atlantic Forest region. Firstly, to show how through comparing and intervening on Mbya bodies and their forms of life, both anthropometric growth standards and state development projects, perpetuate racialised assumptions of human difference and legitimate colonial extractive practices (e.g., conversion of forests to ‘productive’ agricultural land). Similarly, human microbiome scientific initiatives, rather than addressing such racialised (dis)embodied inequalities and extractive practices, contribute to ‘updating’ and potentially amplifying them further through identifying indigenous peoples as western industrialised people’s ancestors and as potential reservoirs for novel probiotics to restore microbes to industrialised societies' guts. Finally, we propose that part of ceasing to reproduce these (dis)embodied inequalities requires ‘us’ to challenge the racialised and colonial histories of the life and geological sciences, to recognise their embodied consequences in the present, as well as how they are implicated in emergent proposals for new geological ‘-cenes’

Responding to the need of postgraduate education for Planetary Health : Development of an online Master's Degree

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-MAltres ajuts: CERCA Programme/Generalitat de CatalunyaPlanetary Health has emerged as a new approach to respond to the existential risks that the clime and global environmental crises pose to human societies. As stated by various stakeholders, the challenges involved in Planetary Health are of such magnitude that education must be at the forefront to obtain a meaningful response. Universities and higher education institutions have been specifically called to embed the concept of planetary stewardship in all curricula and train the next generation of researchers and change makers as a matter of urgency. As a response to this call, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) developed the first online and asynchronous Master in Science (MSc) in Planetary Health. The aim of the programme is to train a new generation of academics and professionals who understand the challenges of Planetary Health and have tools to tackle them. This article describes the development of the curriculum of this MSc, presents the main characteristics of the programme and discusses some of the challenges encountered in the development of the programme and its implementation. The design of this MSc was based on: the alignment of the programme with the principles for Planetary Health education with a focus on human health; a multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary approach; the urgency to respond to the Anthropocene challenges; and the commitment to the 2030 Agenda. The MSc was recognized as an official degree by the Agency for Quality of the Catalan University System, included in the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education, and the Spanish National Academic Coordination body in April 2021 and launched in October 2021. There are currently more than 50 students enrolled in the program coming from a broad range of disciplines and geographic locations. The information presented in this article and the discussion on challenges encountered in developing and implementing the programme can be useful for those working in the development of similar programs

Responding to the need of postgraduate education for Planetary Health: development of an online Master's Degree

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) have developed an online and asynchronous Master in Science (MSc) in Planetary Health. The aim of the programme is to train a new generation of academics and professionals who understand the challenges of Planetary Health and have tools to tackle them. The design of this MSc was based on: the alignment of the programme with the principles for Planetary Health education with a focus on human health; a multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary approach; the urgency to respond to the Anthropocene challenges; and the commitment to the 2030 Agenda. The MSc was recognized as an official degree by the Spanish academic system on April 2021 and launched in October 2021. There are currently more than 50 students enrolled in the program coming from a broad range of disciplines and geographic locations. This article describes the development of the curriculum of this MSc, presents the main characteristics of the programme and discusses some of the challenges encountered in the development of the programme and its implementation

It begins with us: On why our embodied experiences matter in the dis/appearance of worlds

“To ‘de-passion’ knowledge”, writes Vinciane Despret, “does not give us a more objective world, it just gives us a world ‘without us’”(2004, p. 131). In producing ‘knowledge-inpractice’ about our/the ‘body-in-action’ (Mol and Law, 2004, p. 51),“having fun, doing something we do well for the sheer pleasure of doing it” (Graeber, 2014) figures as a form of ‘re-attuning’ and ‘re-sensitising’ ourselves, to re-passion’ our bodies and knowledges. In this short piece, I would like to write about us, STS researchers. I would like to discuss our embodied “significance and agency in the emergence/occlusion of worlds. Usually concealed in the sphere of the ‘private’, ‘quotidian’ and ‘mundane’, I hope to persuade you that your embodied experiences, – always already situated within specific spatio-temporal frames –, matters –, first of all, to you/us, being then crucial for the relationships we establish with our colleagues, ‘‘epistemic partners’ (i.e. informants) and, ultimately, for our discipline(s)

The microbiomisation of social categories of difference: An interdisciplinary critical science study of the human microbiome as the re-enactment of the immune self

The human microbiome—trillions of symbiotic microbial cells harboured in the human body—challenges the tenet of a fixed and self-contained human nature by recognising the role of microbes, along with environmental and lifestyle factors, in the shaping of the immune function. Does this mean that the material-semiotic paradigm of the immune self, or immunity-as-defence (Cohen, 2009), is obsolete? Through the development of what I call ‘feminist para-ethnographies’—an intersectional method that entangles embodied experiences and ethnography with ‘fugitive’ qualitative data in technoscientific claims and quantitative research—and through using analytical frameworks from body studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology of science, this thesis asks in what ways and to what extent human microbiome research is shaping and reconfiguring biomedical practice and experimentation and older scientific and popular ideas associated with the immune self. Drawing on my research findings, I argue that human microbiome science is displacing older ideas of immunity as a guarantor of biological identity and individuality, rendering notions of the self as bounded, universal, and autonomous increasingly difficult to maintain. Yet, I hold that, simultaneously, it instantiates new forms of difference, particularly ‘immunitary privileges’ based on a higher microbial diversity, and reproduces old ones in terms of neo-colonial practices of bioprospecting biodiversity. The central argument I make in this thesis is that human microbiome science takes social groups as pre-existing, ‘natural’ phenomena, and biologises them by attributing microbes and microbial profiles to them. By correlating certain microbial species and diversity with hunter-gatherers (race), women (gender), or high-income families (class), social categories of difference become ‘microbiomised’. Importantly, this thesis also sheds light on how to (co-)produce scientific knowledge that becomes more sensitive and responsive to its social implications (Stengers, 2018) through another dimension of ‘feminist para-ethnographies’: as a material-semiotic device of registration, documentation, and analysis of embodied experiences of human–microbe relations

The Microbiomisation of race: postgenomic determinism at the nexus between bioprospecting biodiversity and bioinequalities in microbial science

The human microbiome challenges the tenet of a fixed and self-contained human nature by recognising the role of microbes along with environmental and lifestyle factors in the shaping of the immune function. Does this mean that the material-semiotic paradigm of the immune self, or immunity-as-defence (Cohen, 2009), is obsolete? This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork of the human microbiome project ‘Microbiomes of Homes across Cultures’ (MHC) conducted between 2013 and 2017. MHC’s experimental core is based on the bioprospection of microbes from biodiversity-rich locales and peoples of the Peruvian Amazon. Among the principal aims of MHC was the search for ‘ancient microbes’ as potential solutions for restoring the microbiome of Western and westernised societies. Through the development of the notion of the ‘microbiomisation of race’, the article demonstrates that, contrary some perspectives in ‘more-than-human’ (Braun & Whatmore, 2010) literature (including ‘multispecies’ approaches) (Hird, 2009; Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Lorimer, 2016), postgenomic microbial science re-enacts an immunity model of inclusion and exclusion, self and other. I substantiate this by evidencing that the microbiomisation of race is constituted within a nexus between bioprospection (i.e. population genomic research) and bioinequalities (personalised medicine projects)

Release of hypoacetylated and trimethylated histone H4 is an epigenetic marker of early apoptosis

11 p.-5 fig.-1 fig. supl.Nuclear events such as chromatin condensation, DNA cleavage at internucleosomal sites, and histone release from chromatin are recognized as hallmarks of apoptosis. However, there is no complete understanding of the molecular events underlying these changes. It is likely that epigenetic changes such as DNA methylation and histone modifications that are involved in chromatin dynamics and structure are also involved in the nuclear events described. In this report we have shown that apoptosis is associated with global DNA hypomethylation and histone deacetylation events in leukemia cells. Most importantly, we have observed a particular epigenetic signature for early apoptosis defined by a release of hypoacetylated and trimethylated histone H4 and internucleosomal fragmented DNA that is hypermethylated and originates from perinuclear heterochromatin. These findings provide one of the first links between apoptotic nuclear events and epigenetic markers.This work was supported by Grants SAF 2001-0059, BFU2004-02073/BMC and Ramon y Cajal Programme (MCYT), and GR/SAL/0224/2004 (Government of Madrid).Peer reviewe