Anthony Rizk

ANTHONY RIZK, then a graduate student at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, (IHEID)), Geneva, Switzerland, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Salvageable Lives: Pathogens, People, and Politics in Lebanon’s Anticipated Collapse,” supervised by Dr. Vinh-Kim Nguyen. The fieldwork takes place among microbiologists in scientific laboratories, physicians engaged in infection and prevention and control (IPC) in hospitals, and non-governmental organizations responding to a prolonged pharmaceutical shortage crisis in Lebanon. Through long-term ethnographic engagement and archival research, this research explores how experts involved in the response to multi-drug resistant microbial infections navigate collapse during a financial crisis that is in the process of re-structuring everyday life and social relations in Lebanon. How is ‘collapse’ manifested, in discourse and in practice? Met with systematic shortages in fuel, water, and pharmaceuticals, how do sites of expertise form and transform, along with changes in the clinical manifestation of antimicrobial resistance? This research examines these questions through the prisms of salvage and ruination, as processes that may play a role in the formation of bio-capital, the building of bio-economies, and as part of the ebb and flow of social life during Lebanon’s experience of collapse.