Investigating drug transformations through an ontopolitical lens

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Drugs produce transformations for people who consume, govern and research them. At the same they time are also transformed. The dynamic character of drugs – the heterogeneous activities they give rise to and support, and the multiple things they ‘do’ and become – has traditionally received relatively little attention in research and governance. Rather than attending to the ways drugs shape and are shaped by practice, researchers and policy makers have approached them as stable chemical entities with reliable and clearly identifiable effects. Recently, researchers have begun drawing on insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to attend to the multiple emergence of drugs, and productively engage with them as relationally co-produced forces with effects formed within heterogeneous networks of actors. This requires researchers to rethink established methods of studying drugs and work with the understanding that research practices actively transform, rather than merely describe, particular realities of drug consumption. Much of this innovation has emerged from Australia, pointing to the significance of STS for alcohol and other drug research in the Asia-Pacific region. This panel will present work associated with Curtin University’s Social Studies of Addiction Concepts research program, exploring how STS-inspired performative accounts have shaped our research and informed new ways of responding to alcohol and other drug issues. Specifically, we investigate what might be called an ‘ontopolitically-oriented’ approach to alcohol and other drug consumption, considering the ways it reformulates conventions of researching and governing drugs, and its implications for alcohol and other drug issues specifically relevant to Australia but with transnational significance.

Sub Unit

• Closed Panels

Individual Presentations

• Doing ontopolitically-oriented research: Investigating and enacting lives of substance - Suzanne Fraser, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

• Assigning, advocating, addicting: Law, drugs and STS - Kate Seear, Monash University

• Making testosterone matter in motivations for steroid injecting - Renae Fomiatti, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

• Take-home naloxone and the ontopolitics of care - Adrian Farrugia, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

Session Organizer

• Adrian Farrugia, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University