25 October 2023
The (Anti)Microbial Gaze: Surveillance Meets Resistance
Abstract:
Katherine Kenny
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a rapidly escalating global health threat, known increasingly through different forms of monitoring. Surveillance, both of resistant organisms and of the antimicrobial prescribing practices that contribute to their proliferation, has increased dramatically over the last decade. So too have audits, which are routinely deployed to evaluate the alignment of local prescribing practices and ensure accountability for concordance with established ‘best practice’ guidelines. However, governing AMR in this way raises important questions including: how do these forms of monitoring play out in practice, and with what consequences? How do they articulate with the machinations and temporalities of hospital governance more generally? Here, drawing on in-depth interviews with 36 participants ranging from ward nurses to hospital executives, we ask what, precisely, this particular way of monitoring medics and microbes – which we conceptualise here as the (anti)microbial gaze – makes visible in the hospital setting, what might be obscured, and how this particular way of knowing may delimit what is seen as possible in terms of intervening in the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance.
Bio:
Dr Katherine Kenny is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies at The University of Sydney. Her research uses qualitative methods and draws on social theory to better understand how illness and wellness are known, experienced, governed and made meaningful both in the clinic and in everyday life. In her research, she endeavors to develop new ways of understanding – and hopefully addressing – some of the key health challenges we face as individuals, socieites and a global community both now and into the future.