Doing ontopolitically-oriented research: Investigating and enacting lives of substance

• In Event: Investigating drug transformations through an ontopolitical lens

Abstract

Addiction has long attracted intense scholarly, policy and media attention. Despite this, little systematically collected knowledge exists on the experiences of people who consider themselves affected by it. This presentation will discuss a research project that set out to generate new knowledge on these lived experiences, and in doing so, to produce a web site (livesofsubstance.org) presenting accounts of such experiences in video, audio and text format. The aim of this presentation will not be to report on these findings or on the website per se, however. Instead it will examine the project from the point of view of its ontological politics. As I will argue, the project and its outcomes were fundamentally inspired by the insight that research not only explores and describes realities, it actively constitutes the realities it explores, playing a direct role in reconstituting realities through its conduct, outcomes and communications. I adopt the term ontopolitically-oriented research to describe this approach. My analysis will focus on the project’s methods, describing the ways it devised and implemented methods best able to articulate its aims, and the key discussions and steps involved in ensuring these methods were as academically rigorous as they were ontopolitically attuned. Specific areas of consideration will include: the methodological performativity of naming, the ontological implications of recruitment, and the liabilities and limits of ‘experience’ and ‘representation’. In concluding, the presentation will propose a set of features of ontopolitically-oriented research, as well as some observations on the steps, obstacles, priorities and pitfalls of ontopolitically-oriented research.

Author

• Suzanne Fraser, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University