Dissertation Grant: Antibiotic Resistance, Planetary Crisis, and Bacteriophage Futures in the 21st Century

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This award supports doctoral dissertation research that focuses on critical socio-technical facets of antibiotic resistant pathogens (also known as "superbugs"). It will examine the scientific, economic, technological, and ecological impacts of antibiotic-resistant infectious entities on human society in the 21st century. In doing so, it will uncover the cultural values, political experiences, and historical contingencies that lead to the dominance of antibiotics for infection-control in 20th century. It will then focus on an alternative approach that uses bacteriophage technologies as a promising frontier in a post-antibiotic world. The results of this research will serve to create civic awareness and to promote informed public participation in research, design, and agendas of emerging life-sciences. It will also be useful to policymakers, regulators and scientists in developing of socially-grounded strategies for confronting antibiotic resistance at local, national, and global scales.This research project examines historical and socio-technical dimensions of the diminishing efficacy of antibiotics. It will outline the crisis, the causes, and the catastrophic potentials of antibiotic failure; that will in turn serve as a locus of an examination of the political and ethical stakes in the production of scientific knowledge, and of the ongoing challenges in deployments of resurgent technologies like bacteriophages to secure human wellbeing. The results of this project will further our understanding of the nexus of extant industrial practices, toxic ecologies, and recalcitrant organisms implicated in the development of planetary antibiotic resistance, conceptualized as the contemporary legacy of the 20th century mass-deployment of synthetic antimicrobial agents; bacteriophages provide a promising frontier in a post-antibiotic, having the potential to unbind that nexus. This project will also reveal reticulated relationships between scientific epistemologies, technological materials, political histories, cultural practices, and planetary futures; it will generate wider conceptions of the ecology of human-bacterial-animal-viral entanglements and their complexity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.