Healing disruption: other histories of intoxication and ‘addiction’

Upper Lounge, University of Exeter, January 26-27, 2023 Organiser: Dr Maziyar Ghiabi, Wellcome Senior Lecture in Medical Humanities & Politics, IAIS.

What do the states (and concepts) of intoxication and addiction look like within/without the Western world and its historical iterations of capitalism and empire? What can they reveal about political disruption and transformation? What might they offer for theorising the competing impulses of cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, which have replaced liberal constructions of rational subjects, and which are defining electoral standoffs in so many democracies?

The symposium Healing Disruption: other histories of intoxication and ‘addiction’ brings together scholars working at various inter- and trans-disciplinary frontiers through the lens ‘drugs’ (the latter broadly defined). It invites engagement with ways of knowing and modes of being that transverse dominant understandings of intoxication and ‘addiction’. Participants rethink, and unthink, drug histories and politics in dialogue with epistemological, ontological, and cosmological approaches, grounded in empirical inquiries into localised cultural environments and political times.

Our proceedings include launches and critical discussions around two special journal issues of thematic relevance. These are ‘In/Beyond the Colony: Writing Drugs in the South’ (Social History of Alcohol and Drugs) guest-edited by Maziyar Ghiabi (Exeter) and Thembisa Waetjen (Johannesburg), in Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (University of Chicago Press); and ‘The Everyday Lives of Drugs’ edited by Maziyar Ghiabi, in Third World Quarterly (Routledge).

Relatedly, the symposium is designed to prepare the grounds for further collective and individual research projects, with panels airing new work that will seed future publications. Participants have an opportunity to confer with the journal editors of Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, and Drugs, Habit and Social Policy; as well as with publishers such as McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Please find the programme for the symposium here: Healing Disruption Programme