Microbial Temporalities in Anthropocene Research (2026-2029)

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 affects 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.

Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time

University of Minnesota Press (link)
Forthcoming (November 2026)

Within us and around us, microbes are everywhere, constantly reshaping what it means to be human as we interact with them—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Singing with Invisible Worlds theorizes human–microbe relationships through a rare ethnographic account of the fermentation process at the 350-year-old Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan.

Painting a vivid picture of how sake brewers collaborate with bacteria, molds, and yeasts, Maya Hey reveals that ambient microbes are not controlled but courted, cultivated, and deliberately choreographed. As the brewers adapt to shifting microbial dynamics, they engage in what Hey calls an “improvisational ethic”—a way of responding to the unknown with care and attentiveness through each phase of blooming and waning across weeks, months, and even centuries. In documenting these remarkable practices, Singing with Invisible Worlds offers an intimate, situated understanding of how we can come to know and live with microbial life, with implications for feminist theory, science and technology studies, and multispecies ethnography.

Unsettling simplistic notions of “good” or “bad” microbes, this book presents a compelling vision for planetary coexistence—one that starts not with grand solutions but with small, rhythmic acts of microscopic attunement.