Environmental imaginaries and the environmental sciences of antimicrobial resistance

The environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance has expanded the scope and scale of policy concern and research interest in antimicrobial resistance to include not just clinical and agricultural settings but a wide variety of environmental spaces and places. This article examines the ways in which environmental scientists researching the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance produce culturally specific forms of environmental imaginaries as a means of stabilising complex, uneven and open-ended environmental, human and microbial relations. These imaginaries work to structure the gaze of scientific enquiry towards particular places, objects and scales, and justify particular decisions and practices over others. Drawing on the imaginaries literature from Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Geography, our analysis examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental imaginaries. In doing so, we identify four imaginaries, the environmental hotspot, the pristine environment, the fluid environment and the environmental reservoir. These distinct but interconnected imaginaries produce a constellation of ideas and assumptions that shape scientific practices, the ways and places in which the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance becomes known, and the types of interventions and actions that are made apprehensible as a result. In opening these imaginaries to interrogation at this relatively formative stage, we aim to identify ways in which social science contributions can complement and enhance the ways in which the figure of ‘the environment’ is brought to bear on responses to antimicrobial resistance.