Antibiotic 'entanglements': health, labour and everyday life in an urban informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda

Antibiotics are a routine part of everyday life in many contexts, contributing to the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our ethnographic research documents the ways that antibiotics have become a key part of everyday life for precariously employed urban day-wage workers living in a larg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical public health 2023-01, Vol.33 (1), p.95-104
Main Authors: Nabirye, Christine, Denyer Willis, Laurie, Nayiga, Susan, Kayendeke, Miriam, Staedke, Sarah G., Chandler, Clare IR
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antibiotics
Antimicrobial agents
Antimicrobial resistance
Drug resistance
entanglement
Ethnographic research
Ethnography
Everyday life
Health
Health services
Health status
Inequality
informal settlements
informality
infrastructure
Labor
Landscape
Political power
Politics
Polluted environments
Pollution
Resistance
Segregation
Slums
Urban areas
Urban environments
Urbanism
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Summary:Antibiotics are a routine part of everyday life in many contexts, contributing to the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our ethnographic research documents the ways that antibiotics have become a key part of everyday life for precariously employed urban day-wage workers living in a large informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. We found that for many people, their daily work and ongoing health was entangled with antibiotic use; that is, people showed us how their antibiotic use cannot be separated from the realities of living in a politically, economically and environmentally degraded 'informal' landscape. Thinking through entanglement as itself a politics, we show how limited political power, inability to demand change, and inequitable access to good health care, are associated with high rates of infection and disease, precarious work, and polluted environments. Antibiotics, we argue, have become a way to negotiate the inequalities written into these informal urban landscapes; their use entangled with ongoing relations with labour, environment and bodily suffering. Through this approach, we show how antimicrobials are used in society, with an attention to how vulnerabilities, risks, and forms of abandonment and exclusion shape their everyday use. Antibiotic use is entangled with everyday life in informal settlements, and the politics that produce 'informality'. In Kampala today, the entanglement of antibiotics with life in informal settlements reveals how forms of urban segregation, life in 'slums' and their everyday acceptance, shape the pathways and uses of antimicrobials.
ISSN:0958-1596
1469-3682
DOI:10.1080/09581596.2021.1994526