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JUNE 2019

Dear Colleague, 


With Spring finally here (!), we’re excited to announce some new and exciting publications from Hannah Landecker and Clare Chandler. 
 
Clare Chandler’s new paper, ‘Current accounts of antimicrobial resistance: stabilisation, individualisation and antibiotics as infrastructure’, is now available open access in the Special Issue Anti-biosis – social and cultural inquiries into human-microbe relationsClare’s paper charts the wide range of socio-political space that AMR occupies, and what it reveals about projects of modernity and every day life itself. Using rich ethnographic data, Clare traces how AMR has emerged as an object of action, while articulating some of the conceptual and practical issues related to the use of an ‘individual’ approach within a ‘One Health’ frame. Clare argues that we might best view antibiotics as infrastructure, meaning antibiotics function as “part of the woodwork that we take for granted, and are entangled with our ways of doing life, in particular modern life. These explorations render visible the ways social, economic and political frames continue to define AMR and how it may be acted upon, which opens up possibilities for reconfiguring AMR research and action”.
 
Hannah Landecker’s piece, ‘Antimicrobials before antibiotics: war, peace, and disinfectants’, is also now available open access within the Anti-biosis Special Issue. Professor Landecker’s piece begins the project of tracing and examining the origins of contemporary AMR, before the introduction of penicillin. Professor Landecker opens up our historical conception of AMR and the microbial and chemical landscapes of pressure that underpin it. This very exciting paper reframes AMR “in a longer historical trajectory...lends new insight into both the social origins and biological evolution of the phenomenon”.
 
Another new and terrific publication is the recently published ‘Antibiotics and activity spaces: rural health behaviour survey in Northern Thailand and Southern Laos 2017-2018', by Marco J. Haenssgen, Ariana Proochista , Heiman Wertheim, Rachel Claire Greer, Caroline Jones, Yoel  Lubell, Felix Paul Reed-Tsochas, Giacomo Zanello, Paul Nicholas Newton, and Mayfong Mayxay. This is a great resource, so please do check it out!
 
We would also like to draw your attention to a new MRF AMR Studentship. It is an interdisciplinary project in Medical Anthropology and History, with a focus on TB in South Africa. This will be a great opportunity, so please do share widely within your networks, and reach out if you know of anyone for the role. 
 
As ever, we are encouraged by the depth of research and writing in the social sciences of AMR. Please do keep in touch so we can share your news within our networks. 
 
Best wishes, 
 
Laurie 

*Correction: In a previous draft of this newsletter, we incorrectly said that the PhD studentship was linked to the FIEBRE Project. It is not. It is a MRF AMR studentship. Details here

Essential Reading: Antimicrobials before antibiotics: war, peace, and disinfectants 

This analysis of antimicrobials before antibiotics uses both biological and historical approaches to examine the origins of contemporary antibiotic resistance in the decades prior to the introduction of penicillin. Genetic studies of resistance elements in contemporary bacterial pathogens point toward the importance of early twentieth century chemotherapies as initial selection pressures shaping the landscape of resistance elements even before microbially-produced antibiotics came onto the scene while historical analysis gives insight into the design of these pressures: specific toxicity in arsenicals, sulphonamides, and disinfectant quaternary ammonium compounds, as well as their industrial-scale production and distribution. Turning from production to application, the specific cases of troop mobilization and poultry farming between 1940 and 1950 in the United States are used to illustrate how profound physical and social disruption, outbreaks of epidemic disease, and mass prophylaxis and antisepsis with synthetic antimicrobial agents came together at scale in this period, generating a highly specific landscape of bacterial flourishing and killing, and setting the stage into which the first antibiotics came. Reframing antimicrobial resistance in a longer historical trajectory lends new insight into both the social origins and biological evolution of the phenomenon.

Read here

Essential Reading: 'Current accounts of antimicrobial resistance: stabilisation, individualisation and antibiotics as infrastructure'

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the latest issues to galvanise political and financial investment as an emerging global health threat. This paper explores the construction of AMR as a problem, following three lines of analysis. First, an examination of some of the ways in which AMR has become an object for action—through defining, counting and projecting it. Following Lakoff’s work on emerging infectious diseases, the paper illustrates that while an ‘actuarial’ approach to AMR may be challenging to stabilise due to definitional and logistical issues, it has been successfully stabilised through a ‘sentinel’ approach that emphasises the threat of AMR. Second, the paper draws out a contrast between the way AMR is formulated in terms of a problem of connectedness—a ‘One Health’ issue—and the frequent solutions to AMR being focused on individual behaviour. The paper suggests that AMR presents an opportunity to take seriously connections, scale and systems but that this effort is undermined by the prevailing tendency to reduce health issues to matters for individual responsibility. Third, the paper takes AMR as a moment of infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star) when antimicrobials and the work they do are rendered more visible. This leads to the proposal of antibiotics as infrastructure—part of the woodwork that we take for granted, and entangled with our ways of doing life, in particular modern life. These explorations render visible the ways social, economic and political frames continue to define AMR and how it may be acted upon, which opens up possibilities for reconfiguring AMR research and action..

Read here

Researchers in AMR: Wirun Limsawart

Wirun's research focusses on the use of the “bio-social interaction framework” – linking in-depth biological studies and social analysis – to understand the global and local problems of antimicrobial resistance. His particular interest is the intersection of the problem of drug-resistance tuberculosis (TB) and universal health coverage (UHC) especially the assemblage of global bureaucratization that effects lives of TB inflicted mobile populations – migrants, refugees, stateless people, and the like – and dominates the health policy and practice of caregiving by healthcare workers: professional and non-professional.

Read more about Wirun

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