Year: 2026
Type: article
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.
DOI: 10.30676/jfas.146839
Authors: Elina Oinas, Katriina Huttunen
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7148315729
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: