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 categorise 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.
Asthose working withtools such as feminist theory, narcofeminism, queer theory, Science and Technology Studies, new materialism, Indigenous knowledges and decolonising 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 todissolve 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 problematised; 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 thatconsider the many boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers that structure how we do drugs, including work that challenges, dissolves, dismantles, questions, pushes, problematises, decolonises, 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: