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I am a scavenger: a feminist, an artist, a scientist, a parent, a holobiont. In 2012, I learned that the human body was 90% microbial. I was transformed: I realised I am not becoming, I already am; already a teeming, seething crowd, always already multiple, always already sympoietic. The vertigo of this understanding was utterly thrilling. Rather than sublime horror, I experienced profound relief and joy in the queer fecundity of my myriad body. Using my training in biotechnology, microbiology and contemporary art, I explore the aesthetics of caring for nonhuman organisms, bodies as queer ecologies, and how radically diverse life and non-life manipulate and orient each other. My understanding of the aesthetics of care has been deeply influenced by Ionat Zurr, Kira O’Reilly, Cat Jones and Svenja Kratz, who are pioneers in art/science. This paper discusses my artistic research with microbes which investigates the gendered and biopolitical relationships between humans and microbes. I explore microbial Umwelten, traversing microbe-human-planetary scales and taking seriously the agency and response-ability of the microbes in whose worlds we live. Untangling such kinships through trans- and interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations between theory and practice, discourse and being, knowledge and experience, art and science, is usually not smooth sailing. Like queers, microbes and microbiological art is often misunderstood. Living and non-living flourishing hinges on the stories we tell, and stories told about microbes are of control and death. However, life is only possible because of microbial kinshipping.

Introduction: A large bowel cancer chemoprevention potential has been demonstrated by the consumption of carrots, which represent the major dietary source of polyacetylenes. Their interaction with cancer cells and enzyme systems of animals and humans has been systematically investigated over the last 15 years and has now been characterised as anti-inflammatory compounds with antineoplastic effect. Our objective is to investigate whether selected carrot species with a high content of the polyacetylenes falcarinol (FaOH) and falcarindiol (FaDOH) prevent neoplastic transformation and growth in humans, without side effects.

Methods and analysis: We will conduct a multicentre prospective binational (Denmark and Sweden) randomised controlled trial, with the aim to test the clinical effects of adjuvant treatment with carrot juice in patients who had an excision of high-risk colon adenomas. Patients from six centres will be randomised to receive either anti-inflammatory juice made of carrots high in FaOH and FaDOH or placebo. We will compare the proportion of participants with recurrent adenoma and mean size of them, found in the 1-year follow-up colonoscopy between the two randomised groups.

Ethics and dissemination: Informed written consent will be obtained from all participants before randomisation. The study was approved by the regional ethics committee in Denmark (ref. S-20230072) and Sweden (ref. 2024-04732-01). After completion of the trial, we plan to publish two articles in high-impact journals: one article on primary and secondary outcomes, respectively.

Trial registration number: NCT06335420.

This chapter examines the experiences of individuals from marginalised communities—such as LGBTIQ+, people with disabilities, under-or unemployed-and what they imagine a net zero future to look like. It then introduces government policies related to global warming and climate change, acknowledging that these communities are often excluded by both government and media in research and discussion on policy development. Using a participatory design methodology, the research provided opportunities for members of these groups to speculate on future needs.

Ephemeral and invisible, smell chemicals are exchanged at all scales, from cellular to planetary, flowing between microbes, fungi, plants, animals, soil, water and air. Odorants move through and between bodies and ecologies, integral to life processes and multi-species place-making. However, olfactory orientations are redolent with the pungent stench of colonial and capitalist over-consumption, extraction and terra-firming. Across Saapmi, anthropogenic climate change has caused unpredictable snow melts that freeze into ice, covering lichen, which is the main winter food for reindeer. Odorants produced by lichen don’t diffuse through the ice and reindeer struggle to smell and find food. This seemingly small shift has profound effects on ecologies, economies and cultures. This poster describes an artistic research project, “There’s no future in ice,” which explores how creative practices can help us better understand the olfactory relations of lichen, reindeer and ice, non-human experiences of ecological grief and loss, and responsibilities of settler-colonial consumption.

Ephemeral and invisible, smell chemicals are exchanged at all scales, from cellular to planetary, flowing between microbes, fungi, plants, animals, soil, water and air. Odorants move through and between bodies and ecologies, integral to life processes and multi-species place-making. However, olfactory orientations are redolent with the pungent stench of colonial and capitalist over-consumption, extraction and terra-firming. Across Saapmi, anthropogenic climate change has caused unpredictable snow melts that freeze into ice, covering lichen, which is the main winter food for reindeer. Odorants produced by lichen don’t diffuse through the ice and reindeer struggle to smell and find food. This seemingly small shift has profound effects on ecologies, economies and cultures. This poster describes an artistic research project, “There’s no future in ice,” which explores how creative practices can help us better understand the olfactory relations of lichen, reindeer and ice, non-human experiences of ecological grief and loss, and responsibilities of settler-colonial consumption.

Microbes are intensely social, communicating and cooperating to perform a wide range of multicellular activities. Social behaviours are mediated by intercellular chemical signaling and surface sensitivity. These are environments where contact zones are physical; vision is irrelevant, touch is all. Bodies brush against each other and their surrounds, animated by chemical transmissions and transfigured by sensation. Communications are visceral: chemical signals excreted and caressed by cell surface moieties. The caress of volatile organic compounds (odorants) on the membranes of cells is known as olfaction and odorants secreted by microbes are fundamental within metabolic processes. Matter forms and dissolves as odorants are ingested, digested and excreted. This paper weaves together Barad’s concept of queer performativity, Hauser & Strecker’s (2020) microperformativity, Landecker (2011; 2023), Hird (2012) and Bakke’s (2017) understandings of metabolism as transformative matter, and Irigaray’s eros (1993) to examine artworks that engage with olfaction and microbes, arguing through these olfactory performances, microbes and humans become sense-able to and of each other, an erotic inter and intra-species communication, a queer metabolic intra-activity that transverses spacetimematter.

In this paper, I examine how research with holobionts (the coagulations of host bodies and other species living in or around them) challenges the onto-epistemological status of the model organism, and the privileging of sex in both sexual selection and queer theories. These theories are complicit in defining norms of sexuality.[1] Although the definition of sex is complex and disputed,[2] dominant sexual selection theories draw from studies of sexually dimorphic individuals (apparently) who reproduce through sex acts, and queer theory, which is defined by sexual desire, is entangled with sexual selection in refusal and in kind. However, an ecology of sex and reproduction occurs within model organisms, including constant asexual cellular and microbial reproduction.[3] The microbial asexuality on which holobionts depend challenges queer and sexual selection theories to explore their exclusionary operations and legacies of sexed individualism.

 [1] Kristina Gupta, “‘And Now I’m Just Different, but There’s Nothing Actually Wrong With Me’: Asexual Marginalization and Resistance,” Journal of Homosexuality vol. 64, no. 8 (2017): 991–1013, 1003.[2] Janet L. Leonard, “Sexual Selection: Lessons From Hermaphrodite Mating Systems,” Integrative and Comparative Biology vol. 46, no. 4 (2005): 349–367. Duur Aanen, Madeleine Beekman, and Hanna Kokko, “Weird Sex: The Underappreciated Diversity of Sexual Reproduction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences vol. 371, issue 1706 (October 2016).[3] Graham Bell, “Experimental Sexual Selection in Chlamydomonas,” Journal of Evolutionary Biology vol. 18, no. 3 (May 2005): 722–734. Myra Hird, “Animal Transex,” Australian Feminist Studies vol. 20, no. 49 (2006): 35–50.