Contemporary Drug Problems Conference
Manchester, 27–29 August 2025
Boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers
We imagine, study, live and make drugs through boundaries. Drugs move transnationally, as do the people who cultivate, consume and sell them. Drugs travel across borders of ‘producing’ and ‘consuming’ countries. Drugs move between bodies, permeating boundaries of interiority and exteriority, skin, blood and brain. Laws categorize drugs through binaries: as licit or illicit, medicinal or non-medicinal, intoxicating or therapeutically transformative. Drugs are made through distinctions between human and ‘non-human’ worlds, and anxieties about and practices concerning drug use are constituted through binaries of control and compulsion. In cultural contexts that celebrate control, rationality, authenticity, and order, people who use drugs and those who are understood be experiencing ‘addiction’ become devalued, because they are constituted as compulsive, irrational, duplicitous and chaotic.
As those working with tools such as feminist theory, narcofeminism, queer theory, Science and Technology Studies, new materialism, Indigenous knowledges and decolonizing methodologies have shown, it is important to identify and probe these boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers. What do these boundaries mean, do and make possible? Are they barriers to understanding and progress in relation to drug law reform? How might we think and do drugs otherwise if we work to dissolve borders between people and drugs, human and non-human, licit and illicit, subject and object, blood and brain? What becomes possible when we disrupt disciplinary boundaries, including through explorations of disciplinary siloing? What do we learn when drugs are the subject of new and interdisciplinary perspectives, or approaches including ancient or ancestral knowledges? How can thought and practice engage centrally with boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers of various kinds, including between drugs, bodies, subjects and objects, the reshaping, reinforcing and dismantling of state borders, and the binaries that shape drugs? Is there value in maintaining boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers?
Building on CDP’s previous conferences, which have opened up questions of how drugs are problematized; how the complexity of drug use can be attended to; how drug use might be understood as event, assemblage or phenomenon; how drugs and their effects are constituted in various forms of practice and interactions/intra-actions; how we might rethink change; and the need to embrace ‘trouble’ in our work, the 2025 conference seeks submissions for presentations that consider the many boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers that structure how we do drugs, including work that challenges, dissolves, dismantles, questions, pushes, problematizes, decolonizes, disrupts, transgresses, reconsiders or restructures them.
We welcome research from those working in anthropology, cultural studies, law, criminology, social epidemiology, history, human geography, public policy, gender studies, sociology, social work and related disciplines, and encourage the innovative use of methods, concepts and theoretical tools. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Alcohol and other drug policy
Co-production and/or consumer participation in policy, service design/delivery and research
Diagnosis and assessment
Drug courts or other specialist, ‘restorative’, ‘problem-solving’ justice approaches
Drug trends
Education/health promotion in schools and universities
Experimentation on humans, plants and animals in drug research
Harm reduction services and measures
Human and ‘non-human’ actors in drug research, policy, law and practice
Legal practices, processes and case law
Monitoring/surveillance systems
Neuroscientific approaches to drug effects and addiction
Popular culture enactments of drug use
Power and positionality between/with researchers and people who use drugs
Prohibition and international drug conventions
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
Reflexivity and research identities, including processes of categorisation (‘lived experience’, ‘expertise’)
Risk discourse
Social media websites and apps
Treatment models and practices
Youth and other drug services
Other relevant topics are also welcome.
Call for papers
Submissions for papers for the 2025 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference are now open.
To be considered for the conference, please submit your (max. 300 word) abstract and other details via the Contemporary Drug Problems 2025 abstract submissions Google form.
Submissions close on 15 January 2025, and you will hear an outcome from us in early March 2025.
Conference convenors
Hosted by Contemporary Drug Problems, the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University (Australia); the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney (Australia); the Department of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, The University of Manchester (England); the Advanced School for Social Sciences (EHESS) (France); the Behaviours and Health Risks Program, Burnet Institute (Australia); Turning Point, Monash University (Australia); the Department of Science and Technology Studies , Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA), and the Department of Social Work, Stockholm University (Sweden), this conference will bring together leading international researchers in drug use and addiction studies from a range of research disciplines and methods – both qualitative and quantitative. The conference committee comprises:
Kate Seear (Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Australia)
kylie valentine (Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Australia)
Maurice Nagington (Nursing and Widwifery, The University of Manchester)
Marie Jauffret-Roustide (Centre d’Étude des Mouvements Sociaux, Inserm/EHESS, France)
Mark Stoové (Behaviours and Health Risks Program, Burnet Institute, Australia)
David Moore (Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Australia)
Michael Savic (Turning Point, Monash University, Australia)
Nancy Campbell (Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
Mats Ekendahl (Department of Social Work, Stockholm University, Sweden)
The conference is generously sponsored by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Australia.
2023 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference
Archival information is available for the 2023 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference, held in Paris, 6–8 September 2023.