In July, NAMRIP members attended Camp Bestival with the University’s Public Engagement Roadshow Team, to talk to families about AMR and some of the research taking place at Southampton. Among the team were Emma Roe and Paul Hurley, who are currently working on the ‘Fighting superbugs on the home front: becoming an ecological citizen in your bathroom’ project.
Over the course of the weekend they helped hundreds of children decorate masks of different microbes and to take ‘cell-fies’ in their ‘Microbe Masquerade’ photo booth.
This led to great conversations with children and parents about the diversity of the microbiome, and about AMR. Emma and Paul also used these chats as an opportunity to inform their current research, listening to attitudes towards domestic microbes (variously described as “germs”, “nasties”, “good / bad bacteria”) as well as what antimicrobial cleaning products families use and why. This will feed directly into their current project, and into creative research methods and activities that they’ll employing with families in Southampton in the coming month. You can read more on the ‘Fighting superbugs on the home front' project web page.