How is the future imagined via the politics and policy of AMR? What happens when the metaphors we employ to describe AMR are overwhelmingly linked to the ‘dark ages’ and the ‘impending apocalypse’? What work do these catastrophic formulations do? Do they garner public support? Do they impel more investment in ‘new’ antibiotics? In this article, Brown and Nettleton offer a compelling history and political economy for the emergence of this kind of rhetoric, arguing that what these metaphors really do is nurture the prevailing notion of the individual body at war with a dangerous and dirty bacterial world. What other kinds of futures are possible though? What would a more cooperative – rather than combative – juncture between the human and the microbial look like?

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