Joyce Sauann Lu

Joyce Lu’s dissertation examines how bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR) materializes and becomes known as an epidemiological event in the western highlands of Guatemala. In her multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, Lu documented ways of knowing AMR from the perspectives of medicine vendors selling antibiotics, patients seeking treatment for drug-resistant infections, public health officials developing education programming about AMR, and scientists studying AMR as an interrelated problem of human, animal, and environmental health. AMR exists within zones of growth inhibition on the bacterial culture plate, patients self-medicating with antibiotics, contaminated water sources and soils that sustain agricultural livelihoods, the urbanization of rural peripheries. Conceptualizations of interactions between microbes and antimicrobial drugs are shaped by these different sites and practices of multispecies relationality. Lu’s dissertation locates AMR within a patchy, uneven political ecology of illness, diagnosis, and therapy, in which medicine vendors, patients, and scientists in peri-urban communities draw from diverse empirical modalities and technologies to know, treat, and prevent bacterial infection. Resistance is not the end of therapy, but rather a redirection to other forms of healing bodies and living with microbes.