Where Art Meets AMR 

Demetria Tsoutouras  00:02 

Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, is a crisis we understand well. On paper, we have seen the impact of drug-resistant infections, and we know the economic costs associated with them, yet political action continues to lag behind the scale of the problem. One reason may be how AMR is communicated. Technical reports and policy briefs are essential, but they do not always make the issue feel immediate, human, or politically urgent.

In November 2024, a two-day workshop titled Through the Petri Glass, brought together artists, storytellers and AMR policy experts to explore a different approach. That workshop transformed into the Art Meets AMR Initiative, providing seed funding to three teams to develop innovative projects, comics, role playing, games and immersive stories that aim to make AMR visible, experiential and meaningful for both the public and policymakers.  

[Music Intro]

Demetria Tsoutouras  01:25 

Welcome to another episode of Unpacking AMR, the podcast that unpacks the latest AMR policy research. My name is Demetria Tsoutouras, and today I’ll be speaking with Alison Humphrey, a postdoctoral fellow with the Global Strategy Lab and the Immersive Storytelling Lab at Toronto’s York University on how art and storytelling can complement evidence-informed policy making, help surface the human and social dimensions of AMR, and contribute to the momentum needed for sustained political action. It’s lovely to be speaking with you today, Alison. Do you mind starting us off by telling us about the type of research you do?  

Alison Humphrey  02:04 

It’s so great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I work in what’s called research creation. So I have a background in theater, directing, like screenwriting, film, television. Have a little bit of background in video games, and I started out my career as an intern at Marvel Comics, way back in the day. And so what I do is I kind of bring all of that creative experience and kind of technical expertise to academic research. And my doctoral work, my research on my PhD was looking at how to use immersive and participatory science fiction storytelling to help young people and the public at large to understand vaccine science and vaccine hesitancy. So kind of both the science and the sociology around vaccination.  

So research creation is a way to use the creative process to understand something. So, you know, researchers in the sciences, they’ll do experiments in order to understand something better. In research creation, the experiments that we do are maybe making, as I did on that project, a science fiction story world in which people can create their own characters and explore how vaccines are tested and how that can help us to trust them more, or, in some people’s cases, less. But the idea being that through the creative process, you learn something you didn’t know before, you understand something a little bit better. You can also use it to help disseminate. We call, sometimes knowledge translation. You can use creativity to help the general public understand something that is, you know, previously, a little bit obscure or like, wrapped in jargon. But research creation is taking a step even further back and learning something through the creative process and then maybe disseminating that also in a creative way. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  04:08 

I think that’s a fascinating and maybe an area that some of our listeners are not that familiar with. So thank you very much for explaining it a bit more. Today, we’re talking about policymakers and AMR, and we know that policymakers are often inundated with data models and technical recommendations on AMR. From your perspective, what does art and storytelling add at this moment that traditional policy communication struggle to achieve? 

Alison Humphrey  04:37 

So I think I’m going to like draw on one of the projects that we’re doing, we’re using the funding at Global Strategy lab to help develop which is in the art meets AMR initiative. We have. Project Number one is called microbial realms, and it’s kind of a Dungeons and Dragons style, immersive role playing game, where you as. Players step into the shoes of different characters and go through an adventure together. Follows a group of healers in a world where antibiotic overuse has created a resistance crisis, and the healers must track down a super bug called omega seven. So one of the things that role playing games, and games, more generally, video games, that people might be familiar with have is they have something called game mechanics. You know, if you’re in a video game, you know, a kind of combat video game, you might have health points, and as you’re fighting somebody else, you know, every hit you take, your health points go down, and so if your health points go far enough down, your character dies. But different from the standard gameplay, the folks developing this game have created resistance points where, if you misuse these weapons that you have, which are metaphorically anti microbials or antibiotics, if you misuse them, every time you do that, the microbes resistance points go up, and that makes it harder the next time you want to use those weapons to get any kind of impact on them at all. And so through the process of playing this game, you understand how antimicrobial resistance develops in a way that you might not if you were just kind of reading it at arm’s length, or reading, you know, an academic explanation of it, you have done something, there was a result, and now you’ve got to live with that result, and maybe your character is in deep, deep trouble, because the weapons that they have no longer work against their enemy. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  06:35 

That sounds really exciting. I think that that sounds like a game that would be exciting for anybody to play. 

Alison Humphrey  06:40 

I think so. I definitely think so. Even people who’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, it’s, you know, it’s designed so that it’s very easy for, especially young people in school, to pick up, you know, immediately, and to play with a dungeon master, kind of leading them through it, so that they can, you know, they can go in knowing absolutely nothing, either about gaming or about AMR, and come out having had a lot of fun, but understanding at a newer, deeper level how AMR actually happens. Fascinating. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  07:15 

One of the aims for the through the Petri glass workshop was to augment reality by making AMR tangible through human stories and immersive experiences, why does grounding AMR and lived experience matter for policy conversations that are often global, technical and abstract? 

Alison Humphrey  07:34 

This is a really big question. I think people in the AMR space are already starting to use, well, they have for a while. It’s nothing new to use human stories, to use lived experience as a way of communicating what the impact of this silent pandemic can be. You know, people who have been through this can, in a way, kind of report back to us from our potential future and say, Hey, this can happen to you. And if you can identify enough with that person, you know, they were just going about their life, they stubbed their toe, and then, you know, nine months later, they’re still dealing with a drug resistant infection that is completely crumbling their world around them. So lived experience stories, true stories, are immensely important. What our project is doing is taking those real life stories and turning them into speculative storytelling. So there is something that, something like science fiction or fantasy, or, you know, certain kinds of speculative storytelling do that gives you a little bit more arm’s length that, yes, you still potentially, if the storyteller is a good one, you really identify with the characters. But it’s a world that’s fantastical in some way. It’s the future, it’s the past, it’s it’s like this completely other fantasy realm in which there are dragons, and that gives you a little bit of emotional distance to maybe explore something that otherwise you’d be like, la, la, la, la. I don’t want to hear it. It’s too scary. You know, I just don’t want to think about this real life terrifying thing that could happen, or that is already happening.

I think one of the best examples of it is Charles Dickens, nearly 200 years ago now, in 1843 British Parliament published the second report of the children’s Employment Commission, which exposed the effects of child labor during the Industrial Revolution. And this report quoted extensively from hundreds of interviews with children, some as young as eight years old, revealing brutal conditions, exploitative pay, shocking abuses in like coal mines, factories and workshops. Charles Dickens, like many people, was appalled by findings of the report, and initially thought he would write a political pamphlet titled An appeal to the people of England on behalf. Of the poor man’s child to sort of translate the report’s findings to the general public. But he changed his mind, and instead he wrote the famous novella, A Christmas Carol featuring the miser Scrooge and his change of heart that saves the life of Tiny Tim. So he wrote to one of the commissioners of the parliamentary report, you will certainly feel that a sledgehammer has come down with 20 times the force, 20,000 times the force I could exert by following out my first idea. And I think that says it all about what a story can do. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  10:39 

Alison, I’m learning so much from you today. I had no idea about that history with Dickens, very interesting and so relevant. Many high level AMR discussions that take place today are behind relatively closed spaces in policy and scientific spaces. So what’s the value of engaging artists, storytellers and curators, especially those rooted in local communities, in shaping how AMR is understood and how it’s discussed. 

Alison Humphrey  11:11 

Just as footnote, I love the fact that you mentioned curators as like part of this, because in the world AMR Awareness Week webinar that we did last month, we had two curators who are part of our group, who kind of talked about how museums and galleries creating a show within them is like creating a story that they are storytellers within space. They are creating a geographic space, architectural space for people to move through the story of AMR and have their attention and their curiosity drawn to wherever they want to go. And then within that overall story, you then have these individual exhibitions or installations that tell a particular part of the AMR story. So but to get back to your original question, good storytellers first have to be good story listeners by doing their own research as well as drawing on research from people like the folks here at the Global Strategy Lab, they can kind of translate and transmit those findings across borders and oceans and language barriers and specialist knowledge bases, but I think one of the best things that they can draw on are the lived experiences and the real life ramifications of antimicrobial resistance. 

So we have two other projects in the art meets AMR initiative. One is called Genesis 1928 which is like a speculative storytelling project that uses time travel to imagine what the world would be like if Alexander Fleming had never discovered penicillin, or, you know, antibiotics had just never become part of our toolkit. So, you know, that was way back in 1928 we’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of that huge event. What if? What if that had never happened? So what they’re doing is they’re creating what they call carefully curated and playful conversations in multiple global settings, from UK hospitals to Amazonian villages and Ugandan waterways to Indian pharmacies, local characters and local microbes will explore the consequences of a world untouched by antibiotic advances. And I think what’s really cool about that is that they are kind of CO creating these alternate realities shaped by local wisdom and modern crises that help us to kind of encourage a rethinking of our relationship with the microbial world. 

The second project is called Surgeon X, and it actually expands on a comic book that was originally published in 1920, 1926, 2016, here I am going way back to Dickens and Alexander Fleming. So surgeon X was a comic was published in 2016 it was a darkly comic comic in the sense of comedic medical thriller set against the backdrop of an antibiotic apocalypse in a near future London in which Rosa Scott, a brilliant and obsessive surgeon, becomes surgeon X, a vigilante doctor who uses experimental surgery and black market drugs to treat patients. Surgeon X risks everything to save lives, but ultimately ends up warping her medical oath to suit her own decisions. So it’s a really compelling comic, and I encourage every listener to go out and find it on the web now. But what they’re doing is reimagining the original print comic as a new web based experience that expands the original story through new interactive layers, animations, documentary clips. Podcasts and personal stories of people affected by AMR worldwide, and they’re partnering with teams in India and South Africa and with the Fleming initiative in the UK to kind of blend humor, politics and real world science. One of the coolest things that we got a glimpse of on the podcast on the webinar again last month was they brought in three lived experience experts who are part of the who’s initiative again to have people who know this from first hand experience speak to the public. But what they did was they created, they commissioned an artist to draw two new pages of the comic in which they had three new characters who are sitting around playing video games virtually through holograms, talking to each other, and they’re gaming with our hero Rosa, and they’re advising her. They advise her at different moments in the story as well, and she doesn’t always listen to their advice. But because, like a lot of surgeons, she has her own opinions, but they’re sharing their own stories as they give advice, and they’re just like funny and intelligent people. So I think that was one of the ways in which drawing on real life, lived experience, can kind of enliven a story and give it so much more depth and so much more insight, but also just kind of more fun, like the audience really can tell when you’ve got something that’s based in real human experience. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  16:36 

I have to say, in the webinar, we saw that the introduction of the webinar by bringing the curators really, really, I mean the audience in the in the webinar was fascinated by that introduction by the curators, but also the addition of the patients that came to us through the WHO task force of AMR survivors, really did add an important element to the webinar. We’ll make sure to link to both of those in the resource page for this webinar, along with more about those projects as well. So I’m just coming up to my final question here, Allison, so just to close things up, a common critique of storytelling is that it raises awareness without leading to change. Based on what you’ve seen through the art meets AMR initiative and similar efforts, how can creative and immersive storytelling be used to support creative policy action rather than just engagement? 

Alison Humphrey  17:37 

That’s a fair cut like I think that is a very good question to ask artists, because sometimes we just get carried away with having fun. And I think having fun is one of the advantages of like, drawing a wider audience, because if someone knows that, you know they’re being given a just a straight up documentary or report about something that’s really horrible and scary, they’re like, why should I go there? If I know this is going to be bad, I’m just going to go over here instead. But if it’s like, there’s this cool initiative called dance your PhD, right? And so people who are doing their doctoral research have to create a dance that interprets their doctoral research to the general public, and it’s just fun. And you’re like, Okay, I have to go watch that, just because that’s so freaky and weird. Like, how can you dance about, you know, chemistry and so that attracts a larger audience. But it’s true that, like, sometimes stories, even when they’re successful, they don’t always have an immediate effect. I have like, talked and almost had like arguments with people in the public health realm that you can’t just stick a microphone under somebody’s nose right after they’ve seen a movie or a play or read a story and say So on a scale of one to 10, how much has this changed your mind? Even though we want to know that, we want to know that it had an effect, but what you’re doing there is almost you’re snapping them out of the reverie of of the kind of spell that a story can weave, and then they know that they’re that you’re trying to manipulate them, and they will very rightly be annoyed by that potentially. So I think what’s important for for all of us in public health and in these areas, is to think, How can we find ways to evaluate the effectiveness of something that might be different, and I don’t have necessarily all of the the answers for how you go about evaluating effectiveness In something where what you’re trying to do is invite people in and plant seeds that are going to grow for days, months, years, and that might have fruit that you never directly know about. So you know, one of the kinds of stories that I really prefer are ones that invite. People into an immersive world that they can explore with their own imagination and their own curiosity, make their own discoveries, and take away whatever insights kind of in their heart that they themselves have come to and that’s a very delicate thing, and that’s a very personal thing, which is not to say that you can’t put a message into something like, obviously, if you’re putting a lot of funding into creating something like a comic book, you want to make sure that it’s doing what you want it to do, which is like, help people think differently about an issue. So one of the newest projects that we’ve got in development that you and I are working on is this comic book that uses the comic form to encourage policymakers to consider how gender affects farmers access to things like vaccines and antibiotics. So on this story, we’ve been inspired by the genres of Afrofuturism. So you can think of the movie Black Panther and solar punk, which is an optimistic form of science fiction that envisions a better future as a way of giving society something to hope for and to work towards. So our story starts in this better future world and then flashes back to the present to look at our current situation and what policies need to change to bring about that better future. And so I think that is, in a way, we are modeling. We’re kind of showing in the story how decisions made in the present will and policies brought about now will have flowers, you know, decades down the road, years and decades. And in fact, one of the discussions we were just having today was, how far in the future should our future be? We were like, should this be 50 years in in the future? Should it be 20 years? And we heard back from some policymakers that we’re consulting with saying that actually 50 years is maybe a little too far. We would like the story to show what happens, say, in 20 years time, or even 10 years time. So we were, like, pushing back, because I like the idea that, you know, we’re going to see these characters in the future, and they’re going to look a little like Black Panther, they’re going to have, like, these cool futuristic costumes, or whatever else, and maybe a little bit of technology that, you know, has holograms in it, or, I don’t know, jet packs, maybe at least solar cold chain, some or others. So all kinds of creative decisions go through the process of development that it’s back and forth, you know, with the people that we’re collaborating with and consulting with, to say, how do we make this story the best that it can be to do what we all hope that it will do? 

Demetria Tsoutouras  22:55 

Okay, if folks are not intrigued, I have to after what you’ve just had to say, I don’t know what else we can tell them, but you know, just a bit more seriously, inviting people to the conversation is so refreshing after, you know, we’ve had quite a few years of very divisive discourse, and it just sounds so important that that’s part of the role that art can play, art and storytelling to invite people into the conversation, 

Alison Humphrey  23:21 

true, yeah. And in fact, you know, like one of the things that in my own work, doing another solar punk project earlier in development, kind of looking at clean energy and electrification, electro tech, and how that can again be something that is attractive and exciting. And you know, solar power is a superpower, is like the tagline that I’m using at the moment. But what I want to do is in creating this participatory science fiction story world, which I call citizen science fiction, the whole point of a story world is it includes all voices. So if you want to, even if you don’t yourself believe a certain way, if you want to create a character who is like dead set against all this stuff, you can do that, and you can explore what that feels like for that character, and what they believe and why they believe it, and what they’re drawing on from their own personal history, or what They’re seeing out in the world, and like, why they have the feelings that they have, or you can have a character who’s for it, and you can create two different characters and have them talk to each other. Like you can take on two different roles and like, write a letter from one character that the other character reads. So I think what story also allows us to do, especially when we’re creating stories and not just receiving them as an audience, is to explore the ways that people see the world who are not us, and to try and really put ourselves in their. Shoes and find out why the divisiveness might be happening where it’s growing from. You know, some of it is Merchants of Doubt who are paid to create divisiveness. And we know that social media is a really, really fertile hotbed for making outrage because it’s profitable for social media platforms and the algorithms promote that. But that’s not, you know, not to say that they create the divisions in the first place. The divisions are there to be exploited. So story allows us to go a little deeper and say, like, Where does all that come from? And where could it go? Both in a kind of dystopian way, like, if it goes, if it keeps going the way it’s going, and we don’t get a better way of communicating with each other, where could we end up? And that’s like the dystopian sci fi. But then the solar punk is really kind of saying, or what could the future look like if we make some good decisions along the route? So that’s why I find it really, really exciting. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  26:04 

So Allison, that sounds very exciting. I mean, all these projects sound very exciting. Can you tell me a bit more? What’s the title of your next project? 

Alison Humphrey  26:13 

It’s called the under grid. So it’s really imagining a worldwide network of people who have chosen to kind of get inoculated with this superpower that allows them to absorb solar power through the palm of their hand and then channel it through their body to create light or heat, or, if they can’t use it themselves, to send it down through the earth the under grid to someone else who also has this superpower somewhere else in the world, maybe somewhere where it’s nighttime and they don’t have access to the sun, and that person can touch the earth, pull the power that’s been sent to them, and make their hand glow. So we’re really talking like Marvel level visual effects, but those, again, will be DIY. So it’s a lot of DIY VFX and participatory science fiction to help people think about energy and power as a superpower. 

Demetria Tsoutouras  27:15 

Thank you so much for joining me today. Allison, I can see from this project, which sounds fascinating, Allison the many different ways that we can use art and storytelling and how those can compel us to act or to build our awareness and understanding of of technologies, global health and many different issues. So while art and storytelling may not replace policy tools, they could be essential to making those tools better and matter more. Thank you very much, Allison for joining us today and joining us for this episode. I’d also like to thank our behind the scenes crew for their support on this episode, Sophia Gutierrez, Kayla strong, Danielle Cornell, Denny drianov, Scott and Lisa Freire and thanks to you for tuning in for another episode of unpacking AMR to find our resources about the topic we discussed today, visit our podcast page at WWW dot global strategy lab.org, forward slash unpacking AMR, until next time, remember AMR is more than drugs and bugs you.