1st Edition
Becoming with Care in Drug Treatment Services The Recovery Assemblage
Employing Deleuzo–Guattarian orientations to assemblage and feminist approaches to care, this book offers a critique of neoliberal approaches to recovery from drugs and alcohol, while collapsing the dualities of harm reduction and recovery.
This monograph empirically explores the practices of care emerging in two drug recovery services in Liverpool and Athens. Following the flows of the participants’ desires, it argues that it is not the lack of the substance that holds the recovery assemblage together, but the production of connections that enhance a body’s power of acting, constituting recovery a practice of collective care. The outcome of the analysis of the lived experiences of people in recovery is a call for the dismissal of policy as an intervention coming from outside, and its reconstitution as a practice produced inside the recovery assemblage.
Focusing on the value of the assemblage as a viable methodological, ontological and epistemological orientation for critical drug studies, this volume contributes to the sociology of health and illness and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Deleuzian Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology and Social Policy, Drugs and Addiction, Public Health and Medical Anthropology.
Introduction: Reclaiming Recovery
1. Engagement with drug research through a feminist technoscientific lens
2. Thinking recovery with the Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage
3. Methods as connection-building devices
4. Of other spaces: the birth of the heterotopia of recovery
5. Becoming a drug user – becoming a service-user
6. The Recovery Assemblage
7. Beyond the recovery assemblage
Conclusion: Services Interrupted
Biography
Lena Theodoropoulou is Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Liverpool.
"As despair increasingly becomes the norm, so too is it clear that the standard ways for addressing it no longer work, if they ever did. This is particularly clear when it comes to addiction. In this timely and original book, Lena Theodoropoulou reimagines practices of recovery and care with a compelling alternative grounded in ethnographic research. It is just this kind of reimagining – empirically-grounded and theoretically sophisticated – that we need today. This book is necessary reading for anyone interested in addiction and recovery."
Jarrett Zigon, Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia, USA; author of HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia and A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community
"Becoming with Care establishes a provocative new orientation to the field of critical drug studies, outlining a means of inhabiting the lifeworlds of people who use drugs so that we might better appreciate the relations of care and mutuality that sustain these worlds. By emphasising relations of care, the book proposes a powerful new ethics for responding to contemporary drug problems, and a compelling new vision of health, wellbeing and recovery."
Cameron Duff, Associate Professor, RMIT University, Australia
