Medicines as Subjects: A Corpus-Based Study of Subjectification in Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Policy

Abstract

The concept of subjectification plays a key role in Foucault’s theory of governmentality and has been an important tool for the analysis of policy discourses, for example, in the form of Bacchi’s (2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? Frenchs Forest, N.S.W.: Pearson Australia) ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ methodology. In this article, I demonstrate how corpus analysis can complement Bacchi’s methodology to offer a systematic and sophisticated account of subjectification processes in policy discourse, using Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) policy as a case in point. I combine Bacchi’s methodology with van Leeuwen’s (2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press) linguistic framework for the analysis of discourse as social praxis, and argue that both Bacchi and van Leeuwen’s methodologies contain an important limitation, which is the assumption that agency is necessarily human. Drawing on anthropological theories of agency, I propose a broader concept of subjectification which includes the process whereby human agency is represented as things. From this perspective, another reading of the results emerges, in which the main subjects are medicines, and the aim of the policy is to save medicines.

Keywords: medicines, subjectification, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), policy Analysis.