233046 SE Microbial biopolitics and the global antibiotics crisis (2023S)

Antibiotics – the ‘magic bullets’ of modern medicine – are losing their therapeutic effectiveness as pathogens (such as bacteria) increasingly develop resistance to drugs. This phenomenon is called “antimicrobial resistance” (AMR) and constitutes one of the most pressing health-related concerns on a global scale (Hoffman et al 2015). The WHO, for instance, considers AMR as the greatest threat to world health, second only to the effects of climate change (WHO 2021). From a social theory angle, AMR puts into question the sociotechnical orders of ‘high modernist’ societies and their decidedly antimicrobial biopolitics (Latour 1993), which have, in the course of the 20th century, become firmly rooted in antibiotics as a vital infrastructure (Chandler 2019) and readily available ‘weapon’ in the ‘war on microbes’ (Walker 2020, Brown and Nettleton 2017).

AMR thus offers several perspectives for scholars of STS to engage with the changing relationships between science, medicine and society against the background of severe global crises – simultaneously, a crisis of health, of sustainability, of innovation, of governance and of imagination.

In this seminar, we will take this global antibiotics crisis as a “keyhole issue” to understand the role of innovation in the governance of pressing global (health) crises. As a specialization seminar in the “politics of innovation”, our overarching ambition is to examine “innovation” as a organizing principle and high-ranking value in contemporary society. As STS scholars have emphasized, “Innovation” has become a veritable political imperative and is deemed a solution for almost every imaginable problem or challenge (Haddad and Benner 2021; Schot & Steinmüller 2019, Pfotenhauer et al 2019). However, the notion of innovation and its meaning are at the same time highly contested. Whilst “innovation” expresses the desire for deliberate change for the better – more often than not articulated and enacted through “new technology” – it is often unclear, what “better” means and for whom, what interests and values are inscribed into particular innovations, and who should design, drive and distribute innovations throughout society in a fair, desirable and effective way.

In the case of AMR, past years have seen several efforts to tackle AMR through “innovation”. Numerous countries have adopted national action plans to promote the prudent and responsible use of antibiotics and to curb excessive overuse; a plethora of initiatives and organizations have formed to make AMR visible, measurable, and controllable, and to support public awareness, behavioral change, and policy action; and several research programs, funds, and public-private partnerships aim to repair the pharmaceutical industry's "broken antibiotics pipeline" and to stimulate the development of new diagnostics and therapies. Throughout these initiatives, "innovation" is invoked as the central formula to "solve" the antibiotics crisis.

In this seminar we will seek to make sense of these developments and pursue the following aims:

- Develop a research specialization in politics of innovation through an in-depth engagement with the antibiotics innovation crisis as a particular field.

- Understand the relationships between social/technological innovation, governance and pressing societal crises.

- Develop a solid basis in medical STS and STS-informed studies of global health governance

- Advance academic research and writing skills by working continuously on a research-based term paper throughout the seminar

Methods:
This seminar is designed as an exploratory learning space that combines different learning modalities, incl. input by the lecturer, in-depth literature study, and student-led independent research tasks. Students are required to work continuously on projects (individually and in groups) and to regularly present the progress of their learning/research experience(handouts, presentations, discussion, etc.)