La Trobe University > Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society > ARCSHS Events > Contemporary Drug Problems Conference

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 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.

As those working with tools 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 that consider 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:

  • 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.

Keynote presentations

Keynote presenters will be added here as they are announced.

Registration

Please check back here for registration information, or follow ARCSHS on Twitter/X or Facebook for the latest updates.

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:

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.