This seminar will present research by Adrian Farrugia, Helen Keane, Mats Ekendahl and Mary Lou Rasmussen.

Much sociological research on young people’s drug consumption seeks to push past the narrow public health focus on risk and harm by centring pleasure as a key dynamic shaping the motivations and outcomes of these practices.

This scholarship demonstrates the limits of a myopic focus on harm by examining, for example, meaningful forms of intimacy, social connection and generative embodied pleasures that form through drug consumption. This intervention often relies on examinations of acute forms of intoxication and ecstatic pleasures, extraordinary consumption possibilities that, by positively transforming everyday life, starkly contrast with narratives of risk and harm. While a highly generative area of scholarship, we ask whether focusing on ecstatic pleasures risks inadvertently reproducing boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary in ways that position drug consumption as exceptional, outside the realms of ordinary life or the ‘everyday’. Combining insights from the sociology of the ‘everyday’ as the site of the mundane and the exceptional with recent examinations of the multiplicity and fluidity of intoxication, Adrian Farrugia, Helen Keane, Mats Ekendahl and Mary Lou Rasmussen analyse how alcohol and other drug consumption is articulated as part of everyday life in interviews with 40 young people aged 16 to 20. 

Although alcohol and other drug consumption was not an everyday practice for most of these young people in the temporal sense, the group examined how they articulate it as part of everyday life by emphasising: 

1. Less florid forms of intoxication,
2. Routine intoxicated sociality, and
3. Solitary pleasures that are not markedly distinct from everyday life but form part of its normative fabric. 

The research argues that these accounts trouble boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary and offer an account of youth drug consumption that grapples with its potential to be an uncontroversial aspect of the everyday, regardless of whether it occurs every day.

Adrian Farrugia is a Senior Research Fellow and leads the Drugs, Gender and Sexuality Program at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. Adrian is a sociologist of health, focused on the political and ethical issues raised by efforts to reduce harms usually understood as drug-related and the governance of health more generally. His most recent research examines how gender and sexuality shape young people’s drug consumption and inform drug education programs.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://anu.zoom.us/j/83593100175?pwd=bx64ZVkGsktX3cDknKYH0B8qECCZvC.1&from=addon
Meeting ID: 835 9310 0175
Password: 123850