Table 1 Results from the agenda-setting exercise, organised by theme.
From: Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
Theme: Microbiome and health | |
1 | How are emerging scientific knowledge and public discourses around the microbiome affecting institutional, vernacular, and other stakeholders’ healthcare practices? |
2 | What is the role of the microbiome in shaping risk and health inequalities? |
3 | Who is currently taking responsibility for shaping the governance of microbiome interventions? Who should be responsible and who decides? |
4 | How do we move microbiome interventions from bench to bedside (or vice versa in the context of DIY FMT in humans), and what are the impacts on patients and publics? |
Theme: Microbiome and lifestyle | |
5 | What terms do people use to describe their interactions/relationship with microbiota (e.g. clean, hygienic, sanitised, dirty, decontaminated), and what do they understand by these terms? |
6 | What practices do people engage in when trying to modulate their relationship with microbes? |
7 | What public health interventions and scientific research aimed at changing interactions between humans and microbes are already taking place? |
8 | What are the origins of the current public consciousness and anxieties about hygiene and cleanliness? |
Theme: Microbiome and environment | |
9 | How does the environmental microbiome reframe understandings of (One) health and wellbeing? |
10 | What are the political and ecological drivers of microbial dysbiosis? |
11 | Who gets to know, diagnose and manage the environmental microbiome? |
12 | How does the environmental microbiome interact with prevalent forms of microbiopolitics (knowledge and governance reliant on knowledge of microbes) such as hygiene, cooking, agriculture and biosecurity? |
13 | What are the implications of the microbiome for prevalent approaches to sustainability: welfare, localism, chemicals? |
Theme: Conceptualising the microbiome | |
14 | How do groups of the public conceptualise the microbiome, if they do at all? |
15 | How is the microbiome visualised and how does this vary in terms of pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes? |
16 | How do narratives and discourses about the microbiome circulate? |
Theme: Thinking with microbes | |
17 | How has the microbiome changed the meaning of citizenship? |
18 | How do ongoing social practices absorb and shape unfolding knowledge of the microbiome? |
19 | How might scientific findings relating to the role of the microbiome in human health, and even psychological wellbeing, impact on understandings of the individual? |
Theme: Valuing and commodifying the microbiome | |
20 | What kinds of value (e.g. scientific, popular, commercial) are afforded to microbes and microbial communities, and how have these changed over time? How do these different forms of value interact? How does AMR affect the valorisation of the microbiome? |
21 | What aspects of the microbiome have been commodified (i.e. translated into commercial products)? How far do processes of commodification map onto both popular and scientific understandings of the microbiome and its value? |
22 | What claims are being used to market microbiome-related products? How far do these relate to evolving scientific understandings of the microbiome? |
23 | What counts as owning the microbiome? Does the possibility of commodifying the microbiome change received understandings of what can be invested with property rights (e.g. intellectual property)? |
Theme: Engaging publics with the microbiome | |
24 | What are the common understandings and attitudes towards the microbiome amongst different publics? |
25 | How, by whom, and through what processes is the microbiome represented and consumed (for example as treatments or dietary interventions)? How does this interface with, affirm or challenge other understandings of health, welfare and the environment? |
26 | What are the publics of the microbiome? For example, those associated with antibiotics, hygiene, food and prebiotics, dysbiosis and FMT. |
27 | How might the publics of the microbiome best be brought into existence? What social science technologies are available for experience and experiment? |
28 | How do we engage with both post-Pasteurian and anti-Pasteurian approaches? |
Theme: Researching microbes | |
29 | When and how does the microbiome come into being as an object of scientific inquiry? What does it encompass, what does it exclude and why do certain areas (e.g. the gut) gain particular traction while others do not? |
30 | What evidentiary techniques are central to the emergence of the microbiome as a distinct object of scientific inquiry? |
31 | What social science tools (conceptual and methodological) can be harnessed to facilitate interdisciplinary investigations of the microbial connections between humans, animals and the environment? |
32 | What would a transdisciplinary response to contested areas of microbiological science (e.g. the relationship between gut microbiome and chronic disease) look like, and how far could it engage with lay people’s beliefs regarding the influence of the microbiome on their own and others’ health and wellbeing? |
