Project G05: Resistant microbes: The threatening and re-ordering of the ‘medical order’ by antibiotic resistance since the 1990s

Abstract

Project G05 studies threat discourse in respect of antimicrobial resistance, which marked a caesura in a modernizing ‘medical order’ first established in the late 19^th century. The project analyzes contrarian structural patterns manifested from the1990s on, in which a re-ordering of the medical order is being sought - with implications for research and clinical medicine but also for health policy. On one side, there has been a shoring up of the traditional order, in which microbes continue to be seen as ‘enemy aliens’; on the other, we have a revaluation of the man-environment interface, with microbes now assigned a positive function. Also studied is the practical fallout from such strategies.