Send message to Author

Short abstract

Antibiotics are leaky substances that heal by harming, blurring toxicity and vitality. Ethnographic research in India shows how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) emerges through everyday practices where antibiotics circulate as mundane objects, producing what I call unruly connectedness.

Long abstract

Antibiotics are paradigmatic substances of contemporary technoscience: they heal and harm at the same time – or rather: they heal by harming, shifting constantly between toxicity and vitality. As leaky substances, their effects extend beyond the bodies they treat and their afterlives continue to affect microbial ecologies, inextricably linking them with the emergence and governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

While Global Health frameworks describe AMR as a coherent planetary (present and future) threat, ethnographic encounters reveal a fragmented reality. Here, antibiotics present themselves as quick fixes for everyday problems, commodities, unlabelled liquids, or chemical traces in feed and environments; AMR may present itself in lab results, a cough that does not resolve, a dead body, or usually as nothing observable at all. Not because AMR is absent in such settings, but because the epistemic and infrastructural practices required to render it legible are unevenly distributed.

Based on fieldwork across different contexts in India, I trace how antibiotics circulate through local ecologies. In these layers of everyday life, resistance is produced and experienced, yet AMR itself often remains a spectral presence that is invisible, actively concealed, or fragmented into disconnected material traces. From this perspective, AMR is not an outcome of clearly identifiable actions, but emerges from a situated convergence of practices.

I conceptualise this condition as Unruly Connectedness: AMR is materially entangled with antibiotics, while the contextual understandings of both remain partially decoupled from that entanglement. This concept highlights how molecular life is rendered (un-)governable by selectively stabilising certain relations.