Carmen McLeod

I am an interdisciplinary social science scholar, exploring multispecies relations in the context of emerging biotechnology applications. I am a Newcastle University Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow, and my work in the HBBE is tracing the embodied and everyday practices that arise when architects, designers, microbiologists and engineers work with ‘living materials’ to create novel prototypes and habitats. My research aims to reconsider understandings of humanity in light of new knowledge about the profound intimacy and entanglements between humans and other species. I am especially interested in the ambivalent ways in which microbial life is discursively constructed as: wild/mutant; natural/artificial; biological/cultural; and friend/enemy. I want to understand how encounters between humans and microbes might change through bio-inspired and bioengineering experiments in the built environment and to consider how this might influence how we think about spaces and places that we share and inhabit.

I have also started working on a project exploring the socio-political aspects and ethical implications associated with experimenting with animals and microbial life towards supporting human travel and habitation in space. This work includes supervising a PhD project (Student: Anne-Sofie Belling) called: ‘Transplanetary Imaginaries of Living Architecture: Sociocultural Explorations of More-than-Human Relations in Off-Earth and Futuristic Habitats.’

Prior to moving to Newcastle, I worked in the University of Nottingham’s Synthetic Biology Research Centre (July 2015 – January 2020), where I facilitated embedding a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) framework within the activities of the Centre. My research also included consideration of the complex ways that language is used in describing human-microbe interactions in relation to three different areas (synthetic biology, Faecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT), and responsible innovation). During this period, I also held a short-term post at University of Oxford (June 2017 – April 2018) contributing to the ‘Good Germs, Bad Germs’ project and the ‘Oxford Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project’ (IMP). From February 2013 to June 2015, I was employed on the Leverhulme Trust Programme: 'Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities', working on the project: 'Animals and the Making of Scientific Knowledge.'