150. With Substance – Rethinking Drugs, Technofixes, and the (Geo)Politics of Harm
Lisa Lehner, Cornell University; Aster Parrott, Southern Tier AIDS Program
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Taking “substance as method” (Dumit 2021), this panel brings classic pharmaceutical studies into conversation with scholarship on illegal drug use, illicit lifeworlds, and harm reduction practices. Drugs are fluid, are “made and remade in relation to shifting contexts” (Hardon & Sanabria 2017) and, ultimately, illuminating these contexts may also highlight the limits of our own concepts and methods. We might “undo the idea of drugs as a useful category” (Szalavitz 2021) entirely, or at least ask: useful for what; to whom?
This panel creates a space for still-marginal STS scholarship centered on how people use and live with illegal or illicit drugs. Looking for critical and care-full modes of research with so-called “vulnerable populations,” we want to explore ways to recuperate the situated, embodied, and experiential knowledges of drug users as valid and valuable.
Pushing back against the epistemic injustices of biomedicalization and the global war(s) on drugs, we invite different understandings of international substance-scapes: the “social lives” of drugs (Whyte et al. 2002), the (geo)politics of harm, and in-built regimes of control. We are interested in the everyday or off-label practices and “technologies of solidarity” (Campbell 2020) that allow for living well in a world not made for drug users. Simultaneously, we seek critical engagement with the dynamics of technofixes that may do little to challenge underlying sociopolitical foundations in the relationship of drug policy to public health.
We welcome early-career, alternative, and non-affiliated scholars interested in building community around care-full research, especially through experimental presentation formats.
