PhD project Nora Molinari
Research interest
Antibiotics are obviously a material biotechnology, but at the same time a formative element of the healthcare system and a fundamental factor of our social relations and modes of production. Since the Second World War, they have contributed to a rapid increase of productivity and have become ever more indispensable. Following the notion of some social scientists that antibiotics can be regarded as a form of infrastructure, I understand antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a phenomenon of infrastructural destabilization of a comprehensive techno-social order. This order is made up of elements such as the biotechnology of antibiotics, human and animal patients, the health systems, the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, the economic system as well as more-than-human worlds such as bacteria and the environmental system. Accordingly, its political regulation is to be understood as an endeavour to (re)establish stability. The object of AMR is therefore by no means epistemologically stable, but is subject to dynamics of change.
The increased European attention to the phenomenon of resistance since the turn of the millennium can be understood as a moment of inversion: the infrastructural character of antibiotics is now becoming visible because there is a shared perception of an all-encompassing threat that cannot be countered effectively as it is linked to a large number of social areas and is global in scope, among others. In view of the widening spectrum of climate- and environment-related debates and associated discourses on infrastructural dependencies and upheavals in steering policy, it seems reasonable to interpret this process in the context of a general moment of reflection on the European nature-culture relationship.
The aim of the dissertation project is to understand on three scales how social processing functions with regard to stabilization practices in relation to the destabilizing factor of antibiotic resistance. The first level concerns the transnational level of EU policy, the second the mass media mediation level and the third the subject level of professionals in the medical field.
Approach
The project pursues a triangulated approach: To address the policy level, a combined policy analysis and historical-sociological discourse and dispositife analysis was chosen. Multimodal discourse analysis tools is intended for a cross-national comparative media analysis. And an ethnographic approach is suitable for capturing how subjects position themselves in relation to the global phenomenon.