The Human Diversity Dilemma: 
Navigating the Intersection of Microbiomes, Ethics, and Society in Africa

Call for Abstracts – Deadline for Submission: 28th July 2025

Selected papers will be part of a journal special issue, more information is coming soon. 

 

 

Human microbiomes are important ecosystems with central contribution to various health and disease phenotypes. Understanding differences between populations and their microbiomes can help to generate health recommendations and interventions to prevent and cure wide-spread non-communicable diseases like pulmonary, metabolic and neurocognitive diseases. In short, the field aims to uncover the combination of lifestyle factors and microbial communities that can promote human health.
Several research groups and research initiatives are working around the world to achieve this goal. Like in genomics, in microbiome research it is central to generate knowledge including minoritized groups and non-White populations to overcome the data gap resulting from their underrepresentation in databases. The inclusion of diversity in databases is done using traditional race and ethnicity categories, but also including lifestyles and subsistence strategies, as well as generalizations like Western or non-Western to refer to populations, diets and microbiomes. By studying different populations and their microbiomes it is expected to identify the main factors affecting microbiome composition and their connection to health states. 
While the field focuses on global scientific goals like global health, possibilities to do research and achieve those goals vary locally. There are still important economic differences between countries in the Global North (and their historical colonial wealth) and those of the Global South (most of them ex-colonies) that translate into current scientific capabilities. These differences are experienced today as economic and infrastructural challenges and dependencies that directly or indirectly have an effect on the epistemic questions asked and the quality of the answers generated. They also introduce several social and ethical challenges that result from power hierarchies within the research community. 
Building on current debates on history and philosophy of biology, values in science, feminist and decolonial philosophy as well as history and philosophy of race this special issue aims to understand the intricate connection between epistemic, ethical and economic challenges faced by human microbiome research practiced in the Global South, more specifically in Africa. We aim to investigate the complex relation between the microbiome, factors  affecting its composition, local histories of race, and technological and economic dependencies to provide a more complex view on the current field of microbiome research. 

We invite medical and ecological microbiologists, philosophers, historians, and social scientists to submit their contributions dealing with these and similar issues from the perspective of integrated history and philosophy of biology informed by debates about science and values, and decolonial and feminist frameworks. Interdisciplinary contributions are especially welcomed.  We invite submission of abstracts of max. 500 words (excluding references). Abstracts must include affiliation and contact information.

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Possible topic lines are: 

1.    Race, ethnicity and lifestyle as factors influencing the microbiome 
Studying different populations is central in microbiome research to define their microbiome and health specificities and similarities, to potentially generalize results. However, the use of descriptors like “race”, “ethnicity”, or “hunter-gatherer”, “Western” and “non-Western” can lead to epistemic and non-epistemic biases. On the epistemic side, the use of these categories can make researchers miss the real factors that impact populations (as those categories are often used as proxies for other factors) or can lead to the misplacement of individuals into groups that may not be relevant for treatment or risk-factor assessment. On the ethical side, these categories can, for example, lead to building stereotypes of primitivity about populations, racialization, othering, and discrimination (Nuñez Casal 2024, Nieves Delgado and Baedke 2021, Benezra 2020). Thus, we need to ask: Are population descriptors useful in microbiome research? Are there more promising ways to understand the causal relation between, for example, different lifestyles and the microbiome? 

2.    Colonialism, technological dependencies and biomedical research in Africa
Colonial powers had heterogenous effects on the development of their colonies (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2017). Today, historical wealth inequality between (former) colonial powers and their (ex)colonies continues to create important differences between what is known today as the Global North and the Global South (Jones 2013). What is the impact of this historical inequality on microbiome research done today in Africa? What is the epistemic impact of technological dependency and asymmetrical power relations on microbiome research? 

3.    Local health challenges in a global scientific context 
What are the central health needs in Africa? How can microbiome research better address this needs? Different authors have highlighted the need to redirect research to focus on the needs of local communities (Mangola et al. 2022) instead of fostering helicopter research and bioprospecting practices (Haelewaters et al. 2021) or parasitic research (Smith 2018). As a response to this problem, authors have proposed different strategies to “give back” and do research in more ethical ways. An open question is how effective this calls for ethics and including local knowers in different ways in microbiome research actually are.  

Further questions should be directed to:

Aline Potiron a.i.potiron@uu.nl,
Phila Msimang msimangp@sun.ac.za and
Abigail Nieves Delgado a.nievesdelgado@uu.nl