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

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

• Love and Hate in Narratives about Psychoactive Drugs Consumption and Users in Uruguay. - Nancy Beatriz Calisto, Academic, University of the Republic (Uruguay); María Pilar Bacci, Universidad de la República; Andrea Clara Bielli, Universidad de la República; Gabriela Lilián Bruno, Facultad de Psicología de la Udelar Uruguay; Lauren Predebon, Universidad de la República (Uruguay); Santiago Navarro, Universidad de la República, Uruguay

• Pharmaceutical Circulation Through Difference in Athens, Greece - Taylor Bell, University of California, Davis

• Sharing is Caring?: “Legitimate Patients” and Informal Economies of Opioid Use - Alli Morgan, RPI

• The Opioid Crisis: Law and Stigma Constructing Outcomes - Christopher Patrick Caulfield, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Session Organizer

• Nancy D. Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute