The Microbial Mother Meets the Independent Organ: Cultural Discourses of Reproductive Microbiomes

The genital microbiome and its potential for detecting sexual assault

Since its inception, the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) has provided key discoveries that can be applied to forensics, in addition to those of obvious medical value. Whether for postmortem interval estimation, geolocation, or human identification, there are many applications of the microbiome as an investigative lead for forensic casework. The human skin microbiome has shown great potential for use in studies of transfer and human identification, however there has been little focus on the genital microbiome, in particular penile skin which differs from other body sites. Our preliminary data on both the penile and vaginal microbiome demonstrates potential value in cases of sexual assault. In this study we describe genital microbial signatures based on the analysis of five male and five female genital samples and compare these results to those from longitudinal studies. Selected taxa, e.g., Gardnerella, Lactobacilli, Finegoldia, Peptoniphilus, and Anaerococci, are shown to be candidate constituents of the genital microbiome that merit investigation for use in sexual assault casework.

Being well together? Promoting health and well-being through more than human collaboration and companionship

Being well together, an inaugural Research Forum, will critically examine the myriad ways humans have formed partnerships with non-human species to improve health across time and place. Across the humanities and social sciences, a growing body of scholarship has begun to rethink the prominence of the 'human' in our accounts of the world by exploring the category less as an individualised essence and more as a temporal process of becoming. From this perspective, being human becomes a process of 'becoming with', performed through interactions with non-human others. This paper introduces a diverse collection of studies, originally presented at a workshop held at the University of Manchester in 2018, which explored how emergent approaches within animal studies might productively and playfully engage with the medical humanities. In each case, human health and well-being is shown to rest on the cultivation of relationships with other species. Being well is rethought and remapped as a more than human process of being well together. Collectively, this research forum invites reflection on what the medical humanities might look like from a more than human perspective.