Understanding entanglements of social inequities with AMR
In this seminar, speakers will explore the intersections of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), social inequities, and the power of integrated research approaches.
These two talks will explore innovative approaches to understanding antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by bridging the gap between biomedical and social research through a bioinfosocial lens, while also highlighting the often invisible human impact of AMR in low- and middle-income countries, drawing from powerful ethnographic stories captured in the EquityAMR project.
EquityAMR: Stories in the Shadow of AMR by Arunima Sehgal Mukherjee
Discourses aimed at combating AMR, though hyper-visible in the Global North, remain largely invisible in everyday lives, especially in LMICs. Despite the rising threat of AMR, its implications continue to be obscured, exerting a form of “slow or attritional violence” that is rarely recognised as violence at all. EquityAMR seeks to address the complexities of this invisibility in everyday life, while also responding to Paul Farmer’s challenge: “Everyone knows that suffering exists. The question is how to define it.” The project interrogates how suffering linked to AMR is lived, experienced, and often invisibilized. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in India and 19 in-depth life stories, EquityAMR explores how people navigate fragmented treatment trajectories in search of care and relief, revealing the face of AMR as it unfolds – unobserved, undiagnosed and invisible.
Building bioinfosocial approaches to understand AMR by Sundeep Sahay
The two dominant streams of research on AMR - the biomedical and social - are driven by different research communities and pursue varying research questions. These independent acting streams create a dualism that constrains a more holistic care, practice, and policy process. Information can play an important role in translating these disparate knowledge regimes in an attempt to create a duality (called bioinfosocial) in guiding theoretical and methodological approaches in the study of AMR. Drawing from a 5-year ongoing empirical project in India called EquityAMR, I elaborate on the process of development of such an integrated bioinfosocial approach, and reflect on some future challenges and mutual collaboration opportunities in this quest.
Speakers
Professor Sundeep Sahay, Institutt for Informatikk, University of Oslo
Arunima Sehgal Mukherjee, Researcher, SUSTAINIT – Sustainable Health Unit, University of Oslo
Event notices
- Please note that you can join this event in person or you can join the session remotely.
- Please note that the recording link will be listed on this page when available.
Admission
Contact
