Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 1

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Throughout history, drugs and medications have been used to produce transformations. Experiments with different substances have taken place in diverse contexts: individual, subcultural, communal, scientific, medical, commercial, criminal/illicit and transnational. Despite the immense diversity and heterogeneity of these experiments, each is subject to specific norms, protocols, evaluative criteria, and concerns; and each often entails assembling publics to validate their findings or assess whatever emerges from them. This Open Panel invites papers about the transformations (intended or otherwise) associated with different practices of drug experimentation and consumption. Against commonplace understandings of drugs as stable entities with unique chemical properties that act to produce identifiable effects, the ontological turn in STS inspires a growing number of drug researchers to conceive the action of drugs and their purported effects to be produced in relation to various other actors, arrangements and networks. How do the practical arrangements devised to put drugs to the test in different places and times tally with the historical, cultural, technological and material processes in which drugs are implicated, and which undoubtedly mediate, extend, and complicate their effects? How are those transformations that extend beyond the experimental apparatus accounted for? What gets neglected? What criteria render specific experiments legitimate, and others illicit, and how are these criteria contested, changed, and/or adapted over time? What is unique about the adventures such experimental subjects undertake? What matters to them? What can be learned from situating their activities? How are their findings translated to other situations, and with what implications?

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Producing Transformations: Drugs, bodies, and experimentation

Chair

• Kane Race, University of Sydney

Individual Presentations

• Chemical practices: transformation and experimentation as part of LGBTQ Australians’ drug consumption - Dean Anthony Murphy, University of Sydney; Kiran Pienaar, Monash University; Kane Race, University of Sydney; Toby Lea, UNSW

• Transforming gay men, sex and drugs: from fear to pleasure - Maurice George Nagington, University of Manchester

• Thinking Sex, Drugs, and HIV: Building Up and Sustaining a Transversal Orientation toward Metastructural Issues and Irresolvable Problems - Stephen Molldrem, The University of Michigan

• Transforming Pharmaceutical Capacities: Experimenting with Antibiotics in Food and Beer Production in Tanzania - Laura Meek, University of California, Davis

Session Organizers

• Kane Race, University of Sydney

• Kiran Pienaar, Monash University

• Dean Anthony Murphy, University of Sydney