Last week the SSAC team took part in the Dangerous Consumptions Colloquium, which was hosted this year by Monash University in Melbourne. Drawing on social, cultural and critical theory to discuss ‘dangerous’, ‘risky’ and contested consumptions, the annual colloquium runs over two days with a single stream of papers. This approach, along with mandated funding…
Consumption of performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) is increasing in Australia and elsewhere, raising questions about health knowledge and needs for those involved. The SSAC team is currently conducting research on the meanings and practices associated with the injecting of PIEDs by men in Australia, and preferred ways of accessing information and advice is…
The SSAC research project Understanding performance and image-enhancing drug (PIED) injecting to improve health and minimise hepatitis C transmission is now shifting focus in its recruiting of research participants. So far, researchers working on the study have interviewed 17 PIED consuming men in Victoria. These men have been recruited from metropolitan needle and syringe programs, online forums and…
Final report from SSAC’s Lives of Substance project now available. Despite decades of research, policymaking and service provision, much remains unknown about lived experiences of alcohol and other drug addiction or dependence in Australia. Little is known, for example, about the range of people currently affected by addiction issues, and how they cope and manage…
SSAC’s Social and Legal Studies of Addiction Concepts research symposium (held on Friday October 7th) reported on the many research projects currently underway in the program. The symposium was hosted by Associate Professor Helen Keane, who is based at the Australian National University, and was divided into three sessions: presentations by program research students, presentations by program staff…
Program now available for this event. Since it began in 2013 SSAC has conducted research on a wide range of topics including Australian, Canadian and Swedish alcohol and other drug policy, personal experiences of addiction in Australia, addiction concepts on Twitter, legal interpretations of addiction, the Victorian drug court, compulsory drug treatment in China, and young people in…
How is addiction constituted in Australian law, and how does this compare with Canadian law? This is the focus of Dr Kate Seear’s Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship, which is entitled ‘Addiction in the Australian legal system: A sociological analysis’. A SSAC Adjunct Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Law at Monash University, Kate has recently arrived in…
Having just completed data collection, SSAC PhD candidate Liz Normand is looking forward to tackling the next phase of her project: data analysis. A qualitative study supervised by Dr Robyn Dwyer and Professor Suzanne Fraser, the project’s key research questions are: How do marginalised young people in contact with alcohol and other drug (AOD) services understand their AOD…
After successful data collection in Melbourne, Bendigo, Sydney and Northern Rivers, interviews for the SSAC research project ‘Experiences of addiction, treatment and recovery’ are now complete. The interviews comprise material from 60 participants who consider themselves to have an alcohol or other drug (AOD) habit, dependence or addiction. Commenting on the experience of conducting some of the interviews,…
Following successful data collection in Melbourne, Bendigo and Sydney, SSAC research project ‘Experiences of addiction, treatment and recovery’ is now entering its final phase of interviewing, this time in the New South Wales Northern Rivers region. Research associate Dr Kiran Pienaar has commenced interviewing in Byron Bay, and plans to collect data across the region,…
DruGS 
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