“Voices of AMR”: The journey of an immersive student project
- Emily Sanderson, Lily Jones, Shweta Vasaya
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
You enter a dark room, illuminated only by the light from a TV screen and a wall projector cycling through live streams of world news, casting the space at times in a dazzling glow and at others in shifting colours and flashing text. You hear a deep, reflective music which fills the space, interspersed with snippets from radio shows. In front of you, you see six booths constructed from long curtains of newspaper hanging from the ceiling, swaying slightly as people move around them. Bold headlines catch your eye: the latest celebrity scandal, and an advert for that product you’re told you really can’t live without.
You know you have entered an exhibit called “Voices of AMR”, yet there is no one here to guide you through this sea of information clamouring for your attention. Unsure at first, you step forward, noticing the headphones hanging inside one of these booths. Curiously, you enter the booth and put them on. You hear a voice which at once quietens the sounds of the room around you; the longer you listen, the more you start to piece together who this is, what they are telling you, and you are immersed in their story.
Up close, the newspaper sheets, woven, stapled and glued into a tapestry of information, begin to reveal - graphs and pamphlets, facts and advice, the context to AMR hidden at first, now begin to grab your attention.The journey that you take through this exhibition is uniquely your own. In essence, this is the journey of what it means to learn about antimicrobial resistance or AMR in our information-saturated world.
Photography from the “Voices of AMR” exhibition
This is a description of a project we produced as students on the MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College London. The project began with a brief from our tutors to produce a creative product that reflected some of the theory and skills we had developed on our course. Struck with the importance of perspective and how each of our unique lived experiences impact our interaction with science, the three of us started down a path which led us to explore the topic of AMR. Already, we knew there was a huge range of experiences and perspectives associated with such a broad issue.
On a more personal level, the inspiration to make an exhibit about AMR was strengthened by the experience of one of our team members’, who struggled to find a solution for recurrent UTIs.
“I still remember writhing in pain, unable to work for a whole week every two months, and no one was able to help me. No doctor told me that I may have a resistant infection, and I only realised it after I read about other women’s experiences in an article. The experience taught me how deep one had to dig in the sea of articles to find out about AMR if you are not aware about it in the first place.”
For another in our group, AMR was not a lived experience, but something encountered first in the classroom and later, unexpectedly, when filming at the Fleming Initiative Science Summit, “Viral Solutions – the promise of bacterial viruses as antibiotic alternatives”. Struck with the realities of AMR, she later related the summit to a friend, only to find they had never heard of the AMR.
“It was in this moment that an issue which had only ever been a topic on a GCSE curriculum suddenly became real to me. I was shocked that my friend had not even heard of it, and the scale of the problem and the importance of public awareness truly hit me. I knew that I needed to learn more and thankfully with this project I had opportunity to.”
With this in mind, we set out to bring to life an experience that captured this feeling in a one-day exhibition showcased to our fellow students at Imperial. With the help of the Fleming Initiative and the AMR Narrative, we were able to capture the lived experiences of the researchers, doctors, and policymakers who are working to solve the problem, as well as the patients living with it and advocating for greater visibility.
Within the exhibit itself, stepping into a booth and putting on the headphones feels like stepping into someone else’s world. You may hear Vanessa Carter talking about her car accident, eventual struggle with MRSA or her advocacy journey, or you may hear Professor Raheelah Ahmed explain differences in public health policy for AMR in Japan, the UK, or India. Each speaker has a rich experience and different perspectives about AMR, and depending on your journey through the exhibit, you will end up with your own unique tapestry woven through these voices.
It takes time and active participation to enter the booth, filter out the noise around you and to piece together their story. But the more we talk about it, the more we see and hear about AMR in the information that surrounds us, the more we start to recognise what it is and why we should care.
But with a complex scientific topic such as AMR, raising awareness isn’t about dictating or overexplaining theories. What resonates with people is often much more embodied, having a visceral reaction to a space, an experience, an emotion, identifying with the person behind the science or relating to the story of a patient. “Voices of AMR” used human voices to tell personal stories, whilst immersing you in a visually dramatic exhibition space, and the feedback we got is testament to how powerful such an experience is for engaging an audience. Finding unique and creative ways of doing science communication for public engagement means thinking outside the box and telling a story through the science that engages people on a human level.
In the end, our project felt like more than a university assignment; it felt like an insight into the often-hidden world of AMR, a privileged view into the lives of those who experience it daily. Our project saw each of us learn a huge amount about how not only patients come into contact with AMR, but also scientists, clinicians and policymakers. I, for one, can’t help but see evidence of advocacy for AMR all around us now; it jumps out at me from the sea of information I am exposed to daily. And I think that is the power of an experience that makes you stop to listen once in a while.