1st Edition

Becoming with Care in Drug Treatment Services The Recovery Assemblage

By Lena Theodoropoulou Copyright 2023
216 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

216 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

216 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

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