The Syringe is NOT an Object: Harm Reduction, Needle Sharing, and Morality

Tues 5 June 2012, 12.00 midday – 1.00 pm

Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society

Room G04, La Trobe University City Campus

215 Franklin Street, Melbourne, 3000

Abstract: Since its inception in the mid 1980s the concept of ‘harm reduction’ has played a critical role in the development of a) local and global public health policy on Needle Exchange, b) drugs research on heroin use, c) empirical evaluations of drug injecting behaviour, and d) epistemological debates in the social sciences. Addressing the history of harm reduction this paper examines the political, epistemological and scientific controversies surrounding this health intervention. In tracing this history I consider the impact of ‘morality’ in the production of drug injecting subjects, public health policy, and debates on harm itself. In particular, I consider the effects of morality in relation to the policy, practices and politics of the syringe. Focusing on empirical and theoretical evaluations of harm reduction I examine the ways the object has come to matter in the war on drugs and the policy of needle exchange. In so doing this paper investigates what happens when we deploy morality as a sociological object in the empirical evaluation of health policy.

Nicole Vitellone is A.F Warr Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Liverpool. She teaches in the areas of social theory, social research methods, feminist and gender studies, crime and culture. Her research is concerned with the sociology of HIV/AIDS prevention, technology, the non-human and affect. 

Recent publications include:

 ‘The science of the syringe’ Feminist Theory 2011, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 201-209 

 ‘Contesting Compassion’ The Sociological Review, 2011, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 579-596 

‘“Just another night in the shooting gallery”?: the syringe, affect and space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, vol. 29, no 1. pp. 867-880.

Object Matters: Condoms, Adolescence and Time (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).