Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on public health initiatives to reduce antibiotic use among different publics, exploring the ways such initiatives work on people’s attachment to or desire for medication, and the possible contradictions in encouragement to value antibiotics and to avoid them.

Paper long abstract:

Public health concerns about antimicrobial-resistant bacteria have led to efforts to engage different publics with antibiotic stewardship - practices for conserving the current stock of antibiotics and reducing the growth of resistance by ending 'inappropriate use'. This paper critically examines a range of strategies through which stewardship initiatives try to work on users' attachments to antibiotics as an effective health technology. Drawing attention to the ways in which different human sciences (marketing, psychology, economics) are invoked to frame versions of the antibiotic user or subject, the paper will also explore the object politics of antimicrobial resistance, considering how viruses and bacteria are produced as manageable or mundane threats, while antibiotics may be re-imagined or made as ineffective and even dangerous. In many ways the stewardship initiatives examined here reprise familiar problems from public health, for example with the relationship between knowledge and action, or individual and social responses to risk, however they also struggle with the possible contradictions contained in encouragement to value antibiotics and to avoid them. The paper thus seeks to contribute to STS discussion of the issue of antimicrobial resistance, public health responses and understandings of public engagement.