I am convening a session at the CSSM conference in Helsinki, 19–22 October 2026. My panel "Thinking-With Microbes Beyond the Metaphor: Intoxication, Epissedemologies, and Mind-Altering Fungi" is now open for paper submissions until the 24th of April.
Please consider submitting if this sounds like you, or sharing the call with any colleagues who might be interested.
Session abstract:
Microbes are increasingly celebrated as metaphors, ontologies, and methods that challenge modernist, anthropocentric modes of thinking and knowing. Calls to think-with microbes have proliferated across more-than-human scholarship, recognising that while humans may ferment with microbes, microbes also foment us. Yet much of this work remains metaphorical, leaving underexplored what it might mean to think-with microbes in more literal, embodied ways.
This session focuses on microbial metabolites that materially alter human consciousness when consumed, including alcohol produced by yeasts through fermentation and LSD synthesised from ergot-derived compounds. These mind-altering substances have been part of human ritual, medicine, research, and recreation for millennia.And yet despite growing calls for sensory, embodied, and affective research practice, the idea of microbially intoxicated scholarship remains taboo within academic research cultures.
Drawing on the concept of epissedemologies (Jayne & Valentine, 2024)—a play on drunk and epistemology and a call for non-moralising approaches to intoxication—this session invites attention to the political ecologies, ethics, and methodologies of intoxicated research. Can drunkenness or psychedelic experience be studied sober? Do intoxicated states reproduce humanist projects, or might they open spaces for more-than-human modes of doing and knowing? Papers are invited that engage with intoxicating microbes, critical psychedelic studies, and public debates on the cultural politics of intoxication and drunkenness, including but not limited to:
Ethnographic, qualitative, or sensory research on intoxication, fermentation, psychedelics, or other altered states involving microbial or fungal agents
Reflections on intoxication as methodology, embodied methods, and the ethics of researching through altered states
Philosophical, STS, or theoretical interventions on microbial agency, consciousness, and more-than-human onto-epistemologies
Interdisciplinary, arts-based, or biophysical perspectives on thinking-with microbial intoxication
By foregrounding microbial intoxication as a site of experimentation, this session moves beyond metaphors to explore microbial agencies as co-producers of knowledge within the social study of microbes.
Find out more and submit your abstract on the conference website