Birthing antimicrobial resistance: Feminist para-ethnographies as interdisciplinary care knowledge practices

Descrición

In this paper, I ask: Is it possible to develop a ‘critical friendship’ (Rose, 2013) between the social sciences and humanities and the life sciences in order to find alternative solutions to AMR? In response to this question, I engage with decolonial literature on Buen Vivir (De La Cadena, 2010; Gonzalez and Macias Vazquez, 2015; Gudynas, 2011; Harding, 2016; Lanza, 2012; Leon, 2012; Walsh, 2010) and feminist debates on care and care practices (Bellacasa, 2011, 2012; Martin, Myers, Viseu, 2015; Mol, 2008). I develop what I call ‘feminist para-ethnographies,’ an intersectional method that entangles embodied experiences of AMR and antibiotic use with ethnography and ‘fugitive’ qualitative data in technoscientific claims (Nading, 2016). I propose feminist para-ethnographies as an interdisciplinary and biosocial method to tackle both antibiotic overuse and AMR through the realisation of what Denise Riley calls ‘socialised biology’ (Riley, 1983), which refers to biology “lived within particular lives” (ibid: 40). Feminist para-ethnographies is a critical method that records, documents and provides situated accounts of embodied biological experience. It complements what ‘evidence-based biomedicine’ fails to register and see. In sum, Feminist para-ethnographies figures as a theoretical and methodological proposition for a future of interdisciplinary knowledge practices of co-existence, care and decoloniality. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wGZ3WT1ktM&list=PPSV