Text & Photos: Iona Walker
At the close of the autumn semester, CSSM held a beginner-friendly workshop for CSSMers to engage materially and reflectively with their local microbial ecologies. Participants hailing from across the social and natural sciences created Winogradsky columns from soils brought from meaningful places like allotment gardens, home neighbourhoods and favourite forest haunts. Winogradsky columns are designed to house a mini microbial ecosystem that will stratify and change over time, creating within the column the means to see that which is usually hidden beneath our feet. After creating the columns, participants were then invited to create ‘microbial tarot cards’, responding to themselves as nested ecosystems within an ever-changing spaciotemporal landscape populated by beings and forces big and small, seen and unseen.
The workshop was designed to advance the conceptual and methodological aims of the CSSM through interdisciplinary practice and community building combined with practical ‘making and doing’. Creating the columns together enabled participants to engage with lab-adjacent modes of ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’ microbes using techniques not yet explored within the CSSM. Learning this method together added to the already expansive ways CSSM engages with the microbial and was designed to be of use to CSSM members for their future endeavours with the social study of microbes.
As we crafted the columns together, our attention turned to the sensory aspects of soils, noticing their different colours, smells, compositions. We discussed the origins and providence of the soils and reflected on the childlike experience of ‘playing in the dirt’. Research, memories and methods blending together. These kind of sensory, embodied and community-building methods reflect the ongoing character of CSSM in creating relaxed, low-risk activities which foster collegiality and support ongoing projects, formulation of new ideas and cross pollination of existing research agendas. Here, we go beyond the narrow, formalized academic practices for exchange and bring the often neglected aspects of self and sense to both methodological and conceptual work.
The practical making served as a catalyst for collegial exchange at the end of the academic year and as basis for light conceptual exploration through the Microbial Tarot. Here, tarot is framed not as divination but as a metaphorical language for thinking with microbes. Using the Winogradsky columns as inspiration, one might begin to think through this as means to reflect on themes such as change over time, emergence, microbial time, transformation as well as themes of stagnation, containment etc. Participants created cards that played with ‘perspective’; explored microbes as ‘divine’ world shaping forces, the relationship between rot and life, microbes as elemental; grappled with the perils and promise of the microbial world under our feet, as well as adding a microbial interpretation to existing tarot archetypes.
The columns will mature over time and be ready for exhibition at the CSSM conference in October 2026.