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.
Author(s): Lena Theodoropoulou
Series: Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 216
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reclaiming Recovery
Notes
Chapter 1 Engaging With Drug Research Through a Feminist Technoscientific Lens
Difficult Connections: the Response of Drug Ethnography
Ethics of Care and the Researcher’s Positionality
Practices of Policy and Practices of Care
The Desire for an Assemblage of Care
Chapter 2 Thinking Recovery With the Deleuzo–Guattarian Assemblage
Why Deleuze and Guattari
Assemblages of Recovery and Wellbeing
The Deleuzo–Guattarian Assemblage and Other Concepts
Assemblages
Affect and Affective Relations
Becoming
Desire
Territorialisation (Deterritorialisation and Reterritorialisation)
Deleuze and Guattari On Drugs
Notes
Chapter 3 Methods as Connection-Building Devices
Building Connections With People in Recovery
Building Connections Through Interviewing Service-Users
Becker’s Methods and Space-Specific Stories of Drug Use and Recovery
Building Connections Through the Interview Event
Building Connections Through Photography
Building Connections Between Services
Notes
Chapter 4 Of Other Spaces: The Birth of the Heterotopia of Recovery
Drug Use and Recovery in Greece: the Birth of 18 Ano
Drug Use and Recovery in the UK: the Birth of Genie in the Gutter
18 Ano and Genie in the Gutter: Two Different ‘Other’ Spaces
From Differences to Connections
Notes
Chapter 5 Becoming a Drug User – Becoming a Service-User
Becoming a Drug User
Two Questions On Drugs: Causality and the Turning Point
Drug Use as Everyday Practice
Turning Points – Becoming a Service-User
Notes
Chapter 6 The Recovery Assemblage
The Material Recovery Assemblage
Turning-up and Assessment Appointments
Checking-in, Ticking Boxes and Birthday Cards
Becoming Safe
The Affective Recovery Assemblage
Establishing Boundaries
Becoming Hopeful
The Social Assemblage
The Recovery Group
Art Groups
Recovery in the Community
Athens
Liverpool
Notes
Chapter 7 Beyond the Recovery Assemblage
Becoming Content, Becoming Connected
Becoming Slow
Relapse: Connections Built and Broken
Relapse and the Desire for Connection
Relapse and Broken Connections
Troubling Relapse
Chapter Conclusion: Services Interrupted
Note
References
Index
