The 5th Contemporary Drug Problems Conference will be held at Monash University Prato Centre, Prato, Italy, from 4-6 September, 2019
The question of what needs to change and why has been of increasing interest to social scientists in recent years. With climate change widely regarded as the most pressing social issue of our time, yet positive substantive change seemingly permanently deferred, and with government change in the US marked not only by a new party and president but by the apparent abandonment of all conventions of government, change is now perhaps our most dominant political concern or preoccupation.
Drugs are, of course, intensively linked to change, whether to understandings of their capacity to change consciousness, or to their capacity to change lifestyle and health (usually understood as ‘harm’). Injunctions to change are also a common theme in drug research and policy. These injunctions are most often directed towards people who consume drugs, in that they are regularly expected to embrace harm reduction, submit themselves to treatment, reduce their consumption, re-make themselves in recovery, assimilate findings from neuroscience or adapt to punitive social welfare measures. While, in recent years, moves have been made to change the social and legal conditions under which drugs are consumed (e.g. via decriminalisation in Portugal and Canada), consumers remain a major focus of injunctions to change.
Recent social science approaches to drugs and their effects have begun to problematise discourses of change, decentring the individual subject and offering a range of alternative conceptualisations of agency, subjectivity, bodies, risk, affects, technologies, infrastructures and knowledges. How might these nascent alternatives help us re-imagine or re-focus the notion of ‘change’ in relation to drugs? How might they encourage change in research questions, theoretical tools, methods, metrics, stakeholder engagement and modes of interpretation? What changes might be necessary in the assumptions informing policy and other forms of social and political action? How might diagnostic instruments, treatment systems, legal processes, health promotion and popular culture be changed to benefit people who consume drugs?
Building on CDP’s previous conferences, which have opened up questions of how drugs are problematised; how the complexity of drug use can be attended to; how drug use might be understood as event, assemblage or phenomenon; and how drugs and their effects are constituted in various forms of practice, we now seek submissions for presentations that re-imagine the notion and focus of ‘change’.
Delegates are invited to submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) by 1 March, 2019 (Australian Eastern Standard Time).
Abstracts must be submitted online via this link: https://www.cvent.com/c/abstracts/93b5f8f7-b73c-496f-8051-99c579f86f07
Participation is limited and preference will be given to abstracts that directly address the conference theme. Abstracts will be reviewed by the conference committee and delegates will be notified of the outcome of their submission in early April, 2019.
We welcome research from those working in anthropology, cultural studies, epidemiology, history, public policy, gender studies, sociology and related disciplines, and encourage the innovative use of methods, concepts and theoretical tools. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) considerations of change in relation to:
Alcohol and other drug policy
Risk
Prohibition and international drug conventions
Mandated treatment
Drug courts
Education/health promotion in schools and universities
Harm reduction services and measures
Neuroscientific approaches to drug effects and addiction
Monitoring/surveillance systems
Research on drug trends
Quantitative measures of alcohol and other drug use and harms
Qualitative concepts of subjectivity, agency, affect and identity
Consumer accounts and narratives of drug use, addiction and recovery
Medical and other forms of diagnosis/assessment
Treatment models and practices
Youth and other drug services
Social media websites and apps
Popular culture enactments of drug use
Other relevant topics are also welcome.
Following the 2019 conference, Contemporary Drug Problems will publish a special issue featuring selected papers from the conference (for the 2017 conference special issue, please visit http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/cdxa/45/3).
The journal publishes peer-reviewed social science research on alcohol and other psychoactive drugs, licit and illicit. The orientation of Contemporary Drug Problems is multidisciplinary and international; it is open to any research article that contributes to social, cultural, historical or epidemiological knowledge and theory concerning drug use and related problems.
Further information on the journal can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/home/cdx.
Please visit http://ndri.curtin.edu.au/news-events/ndri-events/fifth-contemporary-drug-problems-conference for further details on the conference theme, venue, format and abstract submission.
All queries should be directed to cdp@curtin.edu.au.