Formas Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development
Early-Career Grant (2026-2029)
This project explores scientists’ understandings of temporality in microbial research. Microbes are increasingly called upon to avert environmental crises in what’s been termed the Anthropocene, through innovations like cellular agriculture and creating circular/resilient bioeconomies. In parallel, researchers in science and technology studies (STS) have noted that timeframes shape how research gets conducted, including the quality of the results and the conclusions drawn. With attention to timescale, timing, and synchronicity in laboratories who aim to solve environmental crises with microbes, this project asks: How does temporality affect knowledge production in innovations using microbial life?
To answer this question, long- and short-term lab ethnographies will identify the practices and descriptions of microbial temporalities in relation to human “clock time,” capitalist acceleration, and more-than-human life cycles. Discourse analysis, interviews and focus groups will broaden the perspective from individual laboratories to contextualise the research results within ongoing discussions about sustainability interventions, both nationally and regionally. A concluding pedagogy workshop will engage other (microbial) practitioners and stakeholders into conversation about how microbial temporality can be accounted for outside the laboratory. In so doing, the project contributes to theorising (a)synchronicity across multiple actors and understanding the different sustainability of humans and microbes.
2026 June 24 – Introducing MiTAR (Read more at KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory)
