The Special-SOC AMR (antimicrobial resistance) training curriculum handbook and booklet are an intended resource for trainers who aim to provide high-level training on the relevance of social sciences in AMR to scholars or professionals with a university-level social science background. It is presumed that participants of the training are interested in integrating knowledge of AMR into their professional or academic practice. With the curriculum documents, an experienced trainer or team of interdisciplinary teachers will be able to organize a training. The training consists of a set of training modules totaling five days. The training modules are arranged from a micro to a macro level. Because interdisciplinarity is a key skill needed to work in the field of AMR, One Health is used as an integrative analytical framework.
The booklet is based on a training workshop on the Social Dimensions of Antimicrobial Resistance workshop, led by Dr Daniel de Vries and Ms Luisa Toro-Alzate, MD, MPH, supported by guest lecturers Prof. Clare Chandler, Prof. Olivier Rubin, and Dr Papreen Nahar, at the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit on the 21st, 22nd, September 28th and October 1st of 2021. While not exhaustive by any means, and not meant to serve as a well-researched reference document, this helps to understand the social dimensions of antimicrobial resistance in terms of antibiotic use, behaviour, vulnerability, systems and infrastructures, and governance, and opens the discussion to new ideas to address the threat of AMR.
The training aims to:
The SPECIAL-SOC AMR curriculum is the base for our MOOC The Social Dimensions of Antimicrobial Resistance, hosted by the University of Amsterdam in Coursera.
Download the SPECIAL-SOC AMR curriculum handbook
Download the SPECIAL-SOC AMR booklet
Download complementary PowerPoint slides
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
For more information or feedback, please contact sonar-global@aighd.org.
The Sonar-Global Special-SOC AMR curriculum will bring to the fore relevant approaches that can be employed to conceptualise antimicrobial resistance as well as summarising the social research evidence base, and therefore it is a unique opportunity to learn about this dynamic and evolving field of work which is deeply committed to careful applied research.
Clare Chandler
Medical anthropologist and co-director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Antimicrobial Resistance Centre.
The Sonar-Global special-social antimicrobial resistance curriculum will help foster an appreciation of key aspects of antimicrobial resistance and equip social scientists with the knowledge that they need to conduct high quality social research on this topic.
Susan Nayiga
Social scientist based at the Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration in Uganda
The Sonar-Global workshop has been designed by enthusiastic social scientists with expertise and passion to do AMR research. What is new about this course is that it will re/conceptualize AMR as a ´One Health´ problem by discussing human, animal, food and environmental antibiotic networks, how these systems are interconnected and how they co-produce together antibiotic and AMR trajectories. The course will critically discuss influential AMR literature, it will present AMR case studies, deliver interdisciplinary, provide methodological tools and discuss gaps of knowledge. This will hopefully inspire participants to improve or design new AMR research projects and as such to contribute to the exciting field of AMR knowledge and governance.
Stephanie Begemann
Veterinarian, anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher in governance at the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands
I truly believe that the Sonar-Global Special-SOC AMR curriculum is of a very high importance to train future scientists, experts and policy-makers. It has been conceived in a way that all these elements will be convey through the different courses, in a way that will help the students to make this knowledge quickly operational for AMR research and policy.
Nicolas Fortane
Sociologist at the French Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) at Paris-Dauphine University, France.
There are not that many social scientists yet that conduct research on AMR – and the aim of the Sonar-Global Special-Soc curriculum is to prepare social scientists for taking this step. By providing the course participants with relevant and necessary background knowledge as well as tools for conducting social science research on AMR, it will hopefully prepare and inspire more social scientists to go out and conduct research on AMR.
Louise Munkholm
Postdoctoral researcher investigating the global policy dynamics of antimicrobial resistance, University of Roskilde, Denmark.
I think that there is a gap in term of training: if there are already some social scientists who are working on AMR, there is no curriculum specifically oriented on Social sciences and AMR. Such curriculum is necessary to boost the Social Sciences and multi disciplinary researches on AMR and to train a new generation of social scientists specialized on this important and growing public health problem that is AMR.
Anthony Billaud
Scientific Coordinator at Centre Régional de Recherche et de Formation sur les Maladies Infectieuses (CRCF) of National hospital Fann-Dakar, Senegal.
I am very hopeful that the Sonar-Global special soc AMR curriculum will educate social scientists so that they can work in the field of AMR and provide their expertise and experiences to address this important public health threat/problem.
John Paget
Senior Scientist & Project Leader at Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL), the Netherlands
The Sonar-Global Special-SOC AMR curriculum will enable social scientists to join the debate. To take the role they should have to address the global, regional and national research and program development needed to address AMR, and to work together with other experts on this truly societal issue that affects us all.
Constance Schultsz
MD, Medical Microbiologist and Professor of Global Health for emerging infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre, the Netherlands.
