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Paper short abstract

Inspired by Katherine McKittrick’s call to 'reckon with the materiality of metaphor', this paper draws on an art-based workshop to explore the notion that Covid-19 'ripped up the rulebook' of drug treatment, to imagine new ways of living with drugs beyond dominant addiction treatment systems.

Paper long abstract

In Dear Science, black studies and critical methodologies scholar Katherine McKittrick asks us to ‘sit with metaphor’ (2021, p. 10). In her imaginative and meticulous rebuttal to a depleted social/scientific enquiry, she experiments with method to bring black storying to the fore and ‘invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems’. Inspired by this intervention, I am drawn to ‘the materiality of metaphor’ (ibid) in quite a different empirical space but connected nonetheless by this commitment to finding new epistemic terrain for imagining alternative ways of living, in my case with drugs, outside of the constraints of the dominant addiction treatment system and its available subjectivities and narratives.

The project that this paper is based on explores the disruptions that the Covid-19 pandemic made to addiction treatment, summed up by one consultant psychiatrist as ‘ripping up the rulebook’. This is a fascinating provocation for thinking through alternative treatment spaces as well as what might be possible in the absence of constraint, of a ‘ripped up rulebook’. Putting this metaphor to work, artists, academics, clinicians, civil servants, and treatment commissioners took part in a hands-on practice of ripping up different materials, producing soundscapes based on these activities, reflexive listening, as well as reassembling these materials in collage. Where professionals describe the Covid-19 pandemic as providing the ‘leeway’, ‘permission’, and ‘flux’ to try out new treatment practices, these arts-based workshops extend these possibilities, reimagining not only solutions but more generative problems (Debaise & Stengers 2027; Meek & Fontanilla 2022).