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- Convenors:
-
Nancy Campbell
(Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Kari Lancaster (Goldsmiths University of London)
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- Discussant:
-
Kiran Pienaar
(Deakin University)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
We invite papers that rethink the knowledges and discourses of social movements for ‘harm reduction’ in the area of drugs and health. In the face of decolonial imperatives to move away from “damage-centred” narratives, do we--in effect-do harm when we make ‘harm’ central to our narratives?
Long Abstract:
This open panel invites papers that rethink the knowledges and discourses of social movements for ‘harm reduction’ in the face of the decolonial imperative to move away from “damage-centred” narratives. In the drug policy field, harm reduction movements are often said to have originated in The Netherlands, in other European countries, and to have migrated to North America. Yet such movements flourish elsewhere. How do our origin stories shape our present realities? Is it time to rethink the work of ‘harm’ not only in our narratives but in motivating participation, the shape that participation takes, and the work involved in documenting ‘harm’ through research that is designed to document ‘harm’ and to make evidence? When we make ‘harm’ central to our narratives, do we—in effect—do harm?
The study of social movements and community-engaged STS offers direct invitations to bring our commitments into our scholarship, and ask how the work of STS converges with work in the world. How have the multiple effects of these engagements fed back into the conceptual work of the field? How have STS concepts migrated into drug policy reform movements, harm reduction organizations, intermediary institutions? Finally, what has the institutionalization of harm reduction at various levels of local, state, regional, and national governance meant for rethinking ‘harm’ in context?
We invite proposals for papers and dialogue sessions that focus on rethinking 'harm' in the context of drug user health, 'recovery' and political and cultural solidarities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nancy Campbell (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Short abstract:
This paper rethinks how constructs of ‘harm’ generate harm themselves, yet remain imperative for policy work involved in directly serving drug user needs for health and human dignity. When we make ‘harm’ a central actor, do we—in effect—do harm?
Long abstract:
Where is the locus of harm, and do we as STS scholars have no path but to produce and reproduce it even as we document it? Community-engaged STS invites us to cultivate reflexivity, yet this very reflexivity can deflect critique from larger structural currents and consume us ‘from below’. As we engage with the consequences of pharmaceutical and racial capitalisms, we note production of visual and text-based art that counters the ‘rhetoric of contempt’ historically directed at drug users (especially when pregnant or parenting). This paper explores lively practices through which drug use is integrated into everyday life for the purpose of ‘reworlding’ what Murphy calls an ‘alterbiopolitics’ (2017), a decolonial ‘alterlife’ that calls forth new life forms and new materializations of bodies in the presence of the constitutive ambivalence that pervades drug-using social worlds due to unsafe and harmful practices of policing and surveillance within them.
Historical work on representations of WWUDs, including my own first book, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy and Social Justice (2000), repeatedly shows how mind-numbingly public health campaigns, drug policy discourse, and cultural fictions re-enact sexualized and racialized tropes in congealed and essentializing ways. The persistent damage done by the misleading constructs, figures, confabulations, and tropes of dominant and dehumanizing discourse haunt discourse on drugs. These phantasmatic figures are real in their effects. Let’s depart from such damaging constructs and evolve our field in ways that can provide robust counters to the hegemonic project of documenting harm, trauma, and the damage done.
Lina Pinto-García (University of Oxford - Universidad de los Andes) Javier Lezaun (Oxford University )
Short abstract:
While drug use has been addressed as a public health issue through a harm reduction approach, this is far from the case for drug producers. We explore this contrast and discuss the implications of interpreting the experiences of coca workers through the lenses of 'community' and 'harm'.
Long abstract:
While some of the problems associated with drug use have been addressed as a public health issue for more than two decades—giving rise to an influential movement focused on a comprehensive harm reduction approach to drugs—this is far from the case for those who grow and harvest coca leaves. In Colombia, this group of people continues to be stigmatized, criminalized, and marginalized by the state, the multiple forms of bodily deterioration associated with this labor obscured in the framing of cocaine production as a ‘security’ problem. We advocate for and grapple with the need to recognize coca farmers not only as a social movement legitimately struggling for their rights, but as a community in need of care, whose experiences of illness are profoundly shaped by the socio-environmental dynamics of the War on Drugs and the Colombian armed conflict. Yet, how should we define ‘community’ in a context where violence, armed groups, and militarized state presence are so prevalent? What does ‘community health’ look like when the state fails to account for coca peasants’ health problems and, at the same time, criminalizes them? Is ‘harm’ a useful term to characterize these 'communities' and the best way to verbalize their deteriorating health and place it on the state and peacebuilding agendas? We use the example of leishmaniasis—a vector-borne, parasitic skin disease—to explore the contrast with policies towards drug users, and to discuss the implications of interpreting the experiences of coca workers through the lenses of ‘community’ and 'harm'.
Peter Davidson (University of California, San Diego)
Long abstract:
In the United States, ‘harm reduction’ has long served as a catch-all term for a wide range of practices, approaches, and social movements understood as alternatives to prohibitionist responses to the use of legislatively prohibited substances. Until comparatively recently, the term was on the political/policy fringe, and researchers and service providers often needed to avoid using the term when seeking funding. In recent years however, particularly as opioid-related death rates continued to rise, ‘harm reduction’ has to some degree become mainstream, at least when narrowly defined as relating to specific practices such as naloxone distribution. Funding and other resources are now being earmarked at federal, state, and local levels explicitly for harm reduction oriented research and service delivery. This has led to a range of entities with little prior experience with harm reduction-oriented practices or even histories of outright opposition to them now claiming to be practicing harm reduction in order to access new funding streams or comply with new policy mandates.
In this presentation, I explore ways in which the explicitly “damage-centred” narratives of law enforcement agencies are interacting with existing harm reduction narratives, and how resource allocation is affected as law enforcement agencies adopt language and practices drawn from harm reduction in response to policy and funding changes. This exploration is based on research evaluating impacts of equipping law enforcement officers with naloxone in San Diego and Los Angeles, and on research evaluating the impact of a high volume, low threshold naloxone-on-release program in Los Angeles jails.
Alex Betsos (Rensselaer Polytechnic institute)
Long abstract:
‘Harm reduction’ is a word to describe the radical forms of care that sex workers and drug users have always done for each other (Hassan 2022). Simultaneously, harm reduction as a movement has always been, and/or facilitated, a reterritorialization of the work that drug users and sex workers do to keep each other safe by/with public health/medicine as a discipline. As Hassan (2022) and others have noted there is a distinction between the public health-ification of harm reduction (top-down) and sex worker and drug user-led liberatory harm reduction (bottom-up). In the former, the ‘harm’ in harm reduction serves a neoliberal logic, in the latter the ‘harm’ names the perpetual state violence manifested in interactions between state, user, seller and illicit drug economies. In unequal worlds, where drug users live with both epistemic and material injustice, those who practice the latter, must often appeal to the former. This paper examines this tension, emphasizing how STS scholars can take drug user liberatory projects as technoscientific possibilities enacted in uneven biopolitical topologies (Murphy 2012). I argue that STS should take drug users as actors capable of creating their own concepts. I then explore several areas of “undone” STS (Frickel et al. 2010) necessary to thinking the ‘harm’ in harm reduction and drug user liberation. By examining past technopolitical struggles by harm reductionists with contemporary events I aim to explore how we may hold together the tensions of ‘harm’ in harm reduction.
Kari Lancaster (Goldsmiths University of London) Tim Rhodes (LSHTM)
Long abstract:
In 2001, a modest proposal was posited by the US Office of Research and Development in the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal, made not by drug policy experts but rather by environmental chemists, was for a “nonintrusive tool to heighten public awareness of societal use of illicit-abused drugs and their potential for ecological consequences” (Daughton, 2001). Since then, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has increasingly been regarded as an important adjunct to established drug monitoring tools, promising cleaner and more accurate evidence.
In this paper, we examine how WBE translates from environmental science to drug policy, and back again, and how ‘drugs’, ‘harm’, and its ‘reduction’, are problematised in these moves. By tracing the accretion of WBE in global drug monitoring, including through the World Drug Report, we find that WBE works to multiply complexities, relocating ‘harm’ and demanding renewed attention to the biotic dimensions of drugs as they entangle in their different environments. Drugs are remade not only as a problem of human health or clandestine markets, but as an ecological concern. Extending what Rhodes and colleagues have termed an ‘ecological harm reduction’ our analysis illuminates how a move towards ecologies entails new associations – no longer simply attributing harm as an effect of the object of drugs-chemicals but noticing the new hybrids that emerge. This shifts attention to the combination of how drugs, human bodies, animal bodies, and their environments, as well as epidemiological technologies and regimes of drug surveillance, come together in the circumstance of their meeting.
Dan Kabella (University of California, San Francisco)
Short abstract:
Drawing on archival and ethnographic data, I showcase the emergence of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) from Chicano activists who encounter its objects to capture new understandings of “harm reduction” and MMT in contexts of overlapping social justice movements in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
Long abstract:
This paper explores an alternative drug “recovery” experiment led by the grassroots organization Quebrar. Composed of a network of people who use drugs, recovered from drugs and community activists, from 1968-1972, Quebrar offered an alternative vision for healing and community despite the rise of the drug war and carceral imaginaries of both Hispanics and drugs. Members of Quebrar were heirs to a 1692 Spanish land grant that was partially seized in U.S. federal military expansion for the construction of a radar site. Quebrar recaptured and transformed the cold war site turning New Mexico’s nuclear infrastructure into a war on poverty. This disrupted a long-standing node in a network of intersecting industries that routinely consumed the lives of Indigenous, Chicanos, and Hispanos, including their land, lifeways and identities. I argue that these efforts—reclaiming land, military sites, and ecological space—can be characterized through a mode of decolonial action that act infrastructurally to circulate drug recovery epistemologies, relationalities, and possibilities for recovery in a historical moment yet with continuity for emerging recovery futures. Drawing on fieldwork in Albuquerque, interviews with activists, archival documents about Quebrar’s treatment design, community organizing, funding, and historical analysis of drug and development policies, I explore how Chicanos reconfigured an alternative recovery infrastructure in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands through MMT; reclamation of land; interruption of legal systems that criminalize the “Chicano addict”; and providing forms of education to engage Chicanos in the local histories of colonization and resistance.
Lauren Knight (University of Toronto)
Long abstract:
Journalists are often confined to write between the tension of reliability and immediacy. This complex relationship between the economics of objectivity, a preference towards accessible data, the speed of reporting, and the imbalance of power that comes from the sociopolitical and historical contexts of Canadian media, demonstrates that written forms of journalism as distributed via media syndicates are rarely neutral and carry immense power over vulnerable populations. In the case of Canada’s war on drugs, ‘Crackdown’s’ counter-narrative news podcasting has become one way through which individuals have been able to share their stories, embodying facets of journalism through their extensive research, while also producing subjectivity in spaces of affective lived realities
This paper engages in a case study analysis to address the dimensions through which 'Crackdown' the podcast decentralizes power in Canada's war on drugs, re-sounding the docile body that has been constructed through syndicated news reports and policing. Simultaneously, the audio medium acts as a sonic archival site of collective reclamation, examined through the lens of produsage (Bruns, 2007). Applied to podcasting research, the educational value of produsage in its current scholarship presents knowledge sharing and collaborative production “through which [it is possible] to examine the activities and motivations of independent podcasters” (Markman & Sawyer, 2014, p.33). In the context of this paper, the analysis explores the ways in which Crackdown the podcast embodies a collaborative open-sourced audio medium defined through open participation, fluid heterarchy, unfinished artifacts, and common property and individual rewards.