Format: Journal

The environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance has expanded the scope and scale of policy concern and research interest in antimicrobial resistance to include not just clinical and agricultural settings but a wide variety of environmental spaces and places. This article examines the ways in which environmental scientists researching the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance produce culturally specific forms of environmental imaginaries as a means of stabilising complex, uneven and open-ended environmental, human and microbial relations. These imaginaries work to structure the gaze of scientific enquiry towards particular places, objects and scales, and justify particular decisions and practices over others. Drawing on the imaginaries literature from Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Geography, our analysis examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental imaginaries. In doing so, we identify four imaginaries, the environmental hotspot, the pristine environment, the fluid environment and the environmental reservoir. These distinct but interconnected imaginaries produce a constellation of ideas and assumptions that shape scientific practices, the ways and places in which the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance becomes known, and the types of interventions and actions that are made apprehensible as a result. In opening these imaginaries to interrogation at this relatively formative stage, we aim to identify ways in which social science contributions can complement and enhance the ways in which the figure of ‘the environment’ is brought to bear on responses to antimicrobial resistance.

We assess three words commonly used to represent the environmental dimensions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – ‘hotspot’, ‘reservoir’ and ‘pristine’ – through two questions: how are these terms used in published research; and how do these terms shape research being conducted? We advocate for the community to reflect on and improve its use of language, and suggest four potentially more productive and precise terms for AMR hazard: prevalence; transmission; evolution and connectivity.

Paul Rabinow identified ‘practices of life’ as a potent site of twenty-first-century knowledge and power, arguing that instruments of genomic characterisation will reshape contemporary social relations, thus establishing a new politics of the molecular. Rabinow named this new epoch biosociality. In Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) surveillance terms, gene sequencing technologies and bioinformatics programmes are used to determine resistance profiles of humans, nonhuman animals, and the environments they are embedded within. A regime of global governance has grown around the statistical analysis of the data produced by these new technologies, in which geographic locations displaying certain resistance profiles are designated as ‘hotspots’ of resistance emergence, justifying intervention in the behaviours of the populations inhabiting them.

Producers of statistical data have identified a correlation between AMR gene prevalence and abundance and national development status. They call for more research into the socioeconomic and political capacities of nations to respond to the AMR challenge. This article responds to that call by examining AMR in the context of global development. It explores the processes by which global development regimes have created and perpetuated environments conducive to the production of AMR hotspots in low-income countries. Focusing on two case studies – Bangladesh’s export aquaculture sector and rural development in the West African Republic of Benin – I speculate how histories of postcolonial development potentially configure AMR hotspots. Drawing upon Hannah Landecker’s ‘biology of history’ concept, I argue that the historical development regimes, and the ideologies that underpinned them, have contributed to AMR futures. The article concludes by cautioning that unless combined with insights from qualitative research, advances in biotechnologies – and the knowledge they produce – risk turning the molecular into the latest iteration of North-South domination, perpetuating uneven power relationships and racialised stereotypes by designating certain populations as risky producers of AMR.

Introduction: Antibiotic residues in the environment contribute to the escalating threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), posing significant risks to public health and ecological systems. Understanding how antibiotics enter the environment during their lifecycle is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. This paper maps antibiotic pollution pathways in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, highlighting the potential environmental and human health impacts of antimicrobial production, consumption, and disposal.

Methods: A mixed-methods approach was used, combining qualitative interviews with stakeholders and community members, and quantitative analysis of sales data. Interviews with manufacturers, healthcare providers, and waste management officials provided insights into practices and perceptions related to antibiotic use and disposal. Sales data of four locally manufactured or packaged antibiotics during the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed to trace their journey through the supply chain and identify potential points of environmental entry for antibiotic residues.

Results: The study identified several critical points in the antibiotic supply chain where residues could enter the environment, including manufacturing discharge, disposal practices by consumers, and inadequate waste management systems. The analysis revealed an increase in antibiotic consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating the potential environmental burden. Key areas requiring oversight and management were highlighted, such as the need for better waste treatment facilities and stricter regulatory controls.

Discussion: This research emphasizes the urgent need for a coordinated response at both the state and national levels to enhance environmental monitoring, improve waste management practices, and strengthen regulatory frameworks in India. Addressing these issues is essential to mitigate the growing threat of AMR and protect both environmental and human health. The findings advocate for comprehensive strategies involving multiple stakeholders to ensure sustainable management of antibiotics throughout their lifecycle.

More-than-human, multispecies and animal geographic accounts of the city have tended to focus on large, charismatic and wild organisms, to the detriment of spatially invisible other-than-humans that are central to urban reproduction. At the same time, urban microbial geographies have foregrounded embodied interactions between humans and microorganisms, whether they are symbiotic or pathogenic, often marginalising the material contributions of extracorporeal microbiomes to the urban fabric. Building from these two blindspots, this article focuses on microbial ecologies that live constitutively outside of (other-than-)human bodies and which are intimately caught up in the metabolic intensities and infrastructural environments of the urban realm. There are two key aims: (1) to explore different forms of urban microbial ecologies and (2) to examine their relationships with urban infrastructures and reproduction. My disciplinary lenses are animal geography, microbe studies and urban ecology and my case studies are focused on urban water metabolism. Thus, based on empirical fieldwork on the urban River Lea in East London and supplemented by scientific literature and technical documents, I analyse three urban microbial ecologies that correspond to the urban realms’ ‘extended microbiomes’: those involved in slow sand filtration for the treatment of drinkable water, those involved in sewage treatment via the activated sludge process and those emerging and evolving in disused urban canal infrastructure. These processes spatially manage microbial growth and modulate the distribution of different forms of microbial agency with important effects for the smooth functioning of urban water metabolism. I suggest these ecologies correspond to the ‘spaces’ of microbes in the city, and characterise a mundane system of repetition and regulation. However, microbes continue to assert their agency within the spaces of urban water metabolism, create their own places and worlds and highlight a more-than-human contingency and indeterminacy at the heart of urban reproduction.

For people interested in high-quality food, Italy has long been acknowledged for its production of Parma ham, salami and similar pig meat-based products. For researchers in the field of antibiotic resistance, they are known as products of a highly antibiotic-dependent production system. Italy has one of the highest consumptions of antibiotics by animals in the EU, estimated to be 244 mg/PCU. By contrast, Sweden has the lowest consumption of antibiotics by animals in the EU, estimated to be 12.5 mg/PCU. Thus, the Italian level is about 20 times higher than the Swedish one. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the role of antibiotics in the Swedish and Italian production systems. What are the underlying forces and the key features of the Swedish production system—a system that can actually compensate for routine group treatment with antibiotics through precautionary health and biosecurity? What aspects are behind the different antibiotic consumption patterns in the Italian setting? We argue that the Swedish ability to compensate for routine prophylactic antibiotic group treatment was the outcome of an extensive interaction process: ‘outsiders’ increased the general awareness of routine antibiotic use by debating it in the media, and ‘insiders’ took the debate seriously and consequently acted to develop a production system that was able to compensate for routine use of antibiotics. Based on both the Swedish and Italian experiences, we argue that a legal ban on routine group treatment does not in itself guarantee a change. Those who are supposed to adopt must first share the ideas the legislation rests on; second, they must be prepared to invest in a change of material structures; third, they must foresee a ‘fair’ distribution of costs and benefits among producers and users—that is, an economic context in which all players are incentivised to follow the same route.