Short abstract:

How can we think of affirmative ethics as an engaged methodology? Inspired by Braidotti’s work on affirmative ethics, I draw a cartography of critical drug studies to argue that the field has created collective affirmative ethics by tracing the past decade of academic and policy developments.

Long abstract:

Inspired by Braidotti’s work on affirmative ethics, I draw a cartography of critical drug studies – a field that explores the social, material, and affective constellations of lived experiences of people who use illicit drugs and drug policies that, in turn, shape these experiences – to argue for methodological affirmative ethics. In Braidotti’s reading, affirmative ethics is a collective practice of “co-constructing affirmative modes of relation and values” (2019: 475). Inspired by Deleuzian turn that challenges the traditional qualitative methodologies, affirmative ethics stresses the presence as a process of ‘becoming’ – ethical, accountable, and engaged. Here the field of critical drug studies presents a unique example in which lines between research, advocacy, and personal practice are enmeshed in making up the evidence, interventions, and policy discourse of the field and its radical epistemologies. These methodological shifts include reframing ‘addiction’ as habit and as (re)made in practice (Fraser, Moore and Keane, 2014), understanding drug use through body mapping and artistic engagement (Dennis, 2019a; 2019b), ‘recovery’ as an assemblage rather than individual journey (Duff, 2016; Sultan, 2022b), de-centralizing human agency, and conceptualizing drug use contexts as heterogeneous and dynamic (Duff, 2007; Sultan and Duff, 2021), foregrounding pleasure in drug use, shifting perceptions by ‘coming out’ as researchers who use drugs (Ross et al., 2020), and advocating for anti-prohibitionist policies. Through all these, the field exemplifies engaged methodological collaboration (Calvert, 2023) of becoming different, reshaping practices and entrenched understandings of drug use, and prompting the question of “what are we capable of becoming?”.