CAREER: Investigating how discourse tools conceptualize rules of microbial life

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While microorganisms have long been studied as isolated species, microbiome research has become an important new way to understand microbial life and manipulate the environments these microbes inhabit, from the human gut to wastewater. This project investigates words as scientific tools in microbiome research, focusing on how metaphors shape microbiome science and its applications. While the central role of language in shaping scientific knowledge is well-established, few studies have explored how different language choices may enable different scientific practices. This project links descriptive, experimental, and pedagogical approaches to investigate how metaphors shape scientific knowledge of microbial social relationships, how these relationships are investigated, and how scientists and others work with the capacities of microorganisms. It advances science and technology studies by linking theory and practice around how scientific language choices participate shape what microorganisms become, in science and in wider social spaces, as human relationships with microorganisms are changing. Ultimately, this project aims to identify how language and metaphor matter for how scientists conceptualize and research microorganisms, and to help promote productive, sustainable relations among humans and the microorganisms on which human wellbeing depends. Broader impacts will come from increased capacity for critical reflection in microbiome studies, new interdisciplinary methods, evidence-based recommendations about microbiome communication, and graduate science writing training that deliberately foregrounds relationships among science and diverse communities. This project draws on multispecies and materialist STS theory, relational and processual theories of biology, and the move from deficit to dialogue in science communication to consider microbiome research in terms of the ongoing development of multispecies relationships. Its aims to: 1) investigate peer-reviewed publications to assess how microbial relationships are described, 2) experiment with the capacity of alternative metaphors in scientific practice, and 3) use a science and technology studies-informed approach to science writing to enable early-career scientists to communicate in ways that invite dialogue with diverse audiences. These objectives are linked by seeing words as not just tools for delivering content, but as tools for building relationships among humans and between humans and other species. Juxtaposing computational, qualitative, and interview-based textual analyses enables a rich and systematic understanding of existing microbiome discourses. These descriptive studies yield a foundation for experimental studies of metaphors that may suggest different scientific approaches while prompting scientists to reflect on unseen values and assumptions embedded in their language choices. Together, descriptive and experimental findings will result in shareable materials for graduate science writing training that connects practical writing strategies, science and technology studies theory, and science communication goals for connecting scientists and other audiences. Because students from diverse language backgrounds and marginalized populations are systematically disadvantaged by a lack of formal science writing training, these activities particularly benefit students in these groups, while supporting the widespread science communication move from deficit to dialogue with specific practical tools.This award is co-funded by the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences(MCB)cluster Cellular Dynamics and Function.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.