It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve begin building an interactive timeline of the experiment, which shows how the UV powders have worked to visualise moments of transfer of simulated pathogens. We’ll be adding in some video, as well as tagging and annotating the photos as the data analysis develops. You can see the timeline in different views Hand Hygiene Experiment Timeline

I come to this project with a lot of questions and curiosity. Every conversation | have with others in the research team seems to throw up new knowledge and to shift my thinking. My background is in performance art (as an artist as well as a researcher), in a practice driven by explorations of ritual, of intersubjectivity and of what bodies can do. My research is practice-led, that is to say it concerns knowledge that comes into being through doing, through what Bolt calls “material thinking”, involving “a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the intelligence of the materials and processes in practice.” (30)

Materiality and process are key to a lot of the work that I do, as is collaboration: collaborating with other academics, other artists, with community and research participants and with organisations. I’m interested in collaboration in a formal sense, but also in the less distinct relationships of meaning making that exist when people come together to view or participate in an artwork (and follow a Barthesian understanding of a text being realised in its encounter with a reader / viewer). A lot of my work is experimental, I don’t know what outcomes will be or even (often, what the reason for doing it is), until after I’ve made an artwork or event. We find out together.

Some of my early artwork, after my MA and in the first couple of years of my PhD was concerned with becoming-animal, with Deleuzo-Guattarian ideas around intersubjectivity and the (non)human. Working with AMR brings me back to some of this, to questions of the agency of microscopic life and our close but peculiarly performed relationship with it. Early meetings with Sandra, Jacqui and Lisette really opened up my eyes to the life of microbes, and to how utterly crucial their presence (or absence) is in healthcare settings. As someone who very rarely visits hospitals, the layers of knowledges, practices, rituals and routines around hand hygiene were a whole new world to me.

In this project, I’m interested in the agency of microbes and in how healthcare workers visualise and perform their own relationship to them. I’m interested in how nurses’ bodies relate to the human and nonhuman life of their patients’ bodies and environments, in how practices of cleaning, protecting, touching and not touching, perform different bodies and relationships. I’m also interested in finding out more about engineering approaches, in how the use of imaging technology might translate the movement of living things (both nurses’ bodies and microbes) into points on a heat or vector map.

What lies ahead is an exciting – if challenging – process of dialogue and exchange across disciplinary practices and languages. I’m confident that this pump priming project will broaden the team’s understanding of AMR and bring us novel practices and knowledges towards improving infection prevention.

Reference:

Barrett. E. and Bolt, B. (eds) (2014), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, I.B.Tauris

As a cultural geographer, the opportunity of contributing critically to a three-month experimental study on microbial life proposes a series of challenges and possibilities; from negotiating disciplinary-specific languages and knowledges, to differing approaches to conducting research, and a variety of expectations around what experimentation actually means in the context of academia. Collaboration with medical-based specialists, engineers, and performance scholars at the same time brings to light a number of themes and premises that resonate with my own geographical research interests and expertise – albeit in the unusual geographical setting of the hospital ward.

At the heart of my research interest has been a concern with moving bodies and their interrelationship with space, place and objects. While this in the past has tended to focus on the city, the micro-geographical scale of the healthcare ward provides a valuable opportunity to examine how bodies contribute to, and actively produce, the spaces in which they move. Thinking through the lens of microbial life, I am keen to examine how the nurses’ body, and particularly their hands, facilitate and equally deter the trajectories of microbes. In this way, I am interested in what hands are seen to do and what remains unseen, and equally, how a nurse’s body negotiates and respond to a variety of health care procedures (whether this is repulsion, compassion, or desensitisation).

Equally, and interconnected, my research focuses on the geographies of performance and theories of practice. In this respect, I am interested in mundane everyday practices that we train to do and practice doing over time – of learning and enacting ‘appropriate’ forms of behaviour. The tasks, duties and responsibilities of healthcare practitioners thus offer a rich lens into thinking about degrees of conscious and unconscious engagement with patients and a variety of techniques of care needed. Building on Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, I am interested in infection prevention techniques as examples of behavioural practice, which are re-enacted and performed, or iterated, over time. Yet, in addition, I’m equally concerned with the relationship between practice and power. In what ways do perceptions of surveillance and codes of practice actively shape the biopolitics of healthcare workers and the degree to which their practice is coerced into conforming?

Finally, and more broadly, my research has adopted an interdisciplinary perspective, primarily by bringing cultural geography into conversation with debates arising with the performing arts setting. Cross-disciplinary engagement with nurses, microbiologists, engineers and performance scholars in the context of this project thus opens an unusual, yet invaluable, opportunity to think productively about how we share knowledge in mutually beneficial ways, and work collectively toward tackling shared global challenges such as anti-microbial resistance. Essential to this, I would argue, is a geographical perspective. This includes thinking critically about how geography can enrich medical/scientific knowledge; on the differing social-cultural practices that contribute to the spread of disease or determine decision making in the use of antibiotics; the geopolitical context sustaining health inequalities within and often beyond national borders; and making visible the where and how of infection/AMR – which countries and demographics will be most effected, and in what ways do different pathways/routes/everyday trajectories promote or discourage their geographical spread.