Domains of Critical Drug Studies: Absent Pleasures and Risky Presents in Emerging Spaces of Harm Reduction - I

Abstract

This open panel showcases studies of new social innovations designed to address the critical cultural work performed by pharmaceuticals, their less licit siblings, and their increasingly difficult to classify cousins. The cultural presence of psychoactive drugs has grown in significance with recent changes in governance and commerce; agrarian and industrial production; and environmental and social effects. Risky presents occupy the foreground of drug “epidemics,” regularly figured as cultural crises. How shall we make sense of drug science and pharmaceutical innovation in producing, sustaining, or diminishing drugs and their users? We seek papers that deal specifically with drugs as “technologies of solidarity” in proliferating sites of consumption and harm reduction; with the interruptions of pleasure, absent from discussions of alarm, pain, grief, loss, and harm; and with the sciences—done and over-done, undone and under-done—that make claims about the cultural work that drugs do. This panel will stage new work that opens up emerging spaces of harm reduction to critical scrutiny; historical, social, and cultural analysis that seeks to regenerate useable pasts; and will take an inclusive approach to new scholarship on the varieties of drug experience and conceptual frameworks used to make sense of drugs as powerful material-semiotic actors.

Individual Presentations

• Altered States of Ontology: Hallucinogenic Psychiatry, Psychedelic Fascism, and Acid Communism - William James Guerrero, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Biomedical HIV Prevention, Risk, and New Possibilities for Sexual Pleasure - Nathanael Wells, Monash University

• Drugs as Technologies of the Self: Enhancement and Transformation in LGBTQ Cultures - Kiran Pienaar, Monash University; Dean Anthony Murphy, University of Sydney; Kane Race, University of Sydney; Toby Lea, University of New South Wales and Catholic University of Applied Sciences

• History and Actual Religious Uses of San Pedro Brew in Ecuador - Luis Antonio Gaybor, Central University of Ecuador

• The Kush City Innovation District: Debilitation and Innovation Network Connectivity in Houston's Midtown - Mary Claire Neal, Rice University

Session Organizer

• Nancy D. Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute