The (Anti)Microbial Gaze: Surveillance Meets Resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a rapidly escalating global health threat, known increasingly through different forms of monitoring. Surveillance, both of resistant organisms and of the antimicrobial prescribing practices that contribute to their proliferation, has increased dramatically over the last decade. So too have audits, which are routinely deployed to evaluate, and ensure accountability for, the alignment of local prescribing practices with established “best practice” guidelines. However, governing AMR in this way raises important questions including: how do these forms of monitoring play out in practice, and with what consequences? How do they articulate with the machinations and temporalities of hospital governance more generally? Here, drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-six participants ranging from ward nurses to hospital executives in metropolitan Australia, we ask what , precisely, this particular way of monitoring medics and microbes—which we conceptualize here as the (anti)microbial gaze—makes visible in the hospital setting, what might be obscured, and how this particular way of knowing may delimit what is seen as possible in terms of intervening in the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance.