This project aims to explore transhackfeminism as both a theoretical and practical design strategy to reimagine biotechnologies of care that critically attend to multispecies communities of dysbiotic bodies.

Dysbiosis is defined by a disease-causing imbalance in the composition and metabolic capacity of our microbiome and is primarily the result of the cumulative effects of human-made environmental changes such as pharmaceutical pollution, the Western sanitation movement of the 19th century and the widespread prophylactic use of antibiotics. As an illness of the Anthropocene, dysbiosis has given rise to Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), one of the most pressing global health concerns affecting humans and other-than humans alike. While its painful effects are felt throughout the globe, dysbiosis has disproportionately affected marginalized communities because of the impact physical environments and social determinants of health have on microbial health, positioning it as another pathway through which health inequities arise.

Concomitantly, while there is growing awareness of the impact of the ecological crisis on human health, conventional medicine and pharmacology continue to struggle to reconfigure healthcare practices as human-planetary ones, an issue which extends to design in the context of healthcare. By working with transhackfeminism – a radical feminist biohacker movement that approaches multispecies healthcare issues intersectionality – and more-than-human healthcare design, I wish to explore how the call for microbial health to be understood as a facet of human equity might be expanded to include more-than- and other-than-humans through radical healthcare design. By experimenting with designs which can facilitate forms of radical co-healing with microbial communities, such as with soil and vaginal microbiomes, the research sees its contribution in testing how design methodologies within the fields of healthcare and the more-than-human spheres can adapt beyond human-centeredness and an extractivist relation to living matter.