Paper short abstract:

AMR offers the unique opportunity to interrogate human-microbe relationships at a critical juncture, asking: what is the impact of the military metaphor on human/microbe relationships and how might these be imagined differently?

Paper long abstract:

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognised as an "urgent global threat" (Hancock, 2019), responses to which are often centred in military language and responses. Yet as conventional therapies to 'kill bugs' decline in effectiveness, research increasingly asserts the integral role of microbiome in human health. I argue that this tension offers a unique opportunity to interrogate human-microbe relationships at a critical juncture, asking: what is the impact of the military metaphor on this relationship and how might it be imagined differently?

Fisher states that "Freud's unheimlich is about the strange within familiar" and that being in the presence of the 'weird' often means we are encountering the new and must adjust accordingly. The return of the microbe we cannot control I suggest, invokes this. To reimagine our relationship with the microbial world (the majority of which are either directly beneficial or neutral towards humans) we must confront this. Art has dealt with similar questions of the body through the abject: the "postmodern return to the body' (Ross, 2003: 281) where the "relentless materialism and uncontrollability" of the body is evoked by corporeal entangled fragments (Arya, 2014: 5; Hopkins, 2000: 225). The abject reveals tangibly the 'uncanny' truths about the ecological nature of the 'human' body (such as the revulsion we may feel seeing cultures of bacteria sampled from human bodies). Combining art with multispecies ethnography to investigate human and non-human ecologies, what does it mean to be microbially entangled?