Recovering Assemblages: Unfolding Sociomaterial Relations of Drug Use and Recovery

presented by Dr Aysel Sultan
What is recovery? How do people ‘do’ recovery and how can research trace this? How can we understand it beyond its Western, Anglo-American, and familiar connotations? Finally, how do different drug policies and national drug discourses understand and enforce recovery?
In this talk, I will explore these questions and illustrate personal accounts of recovery that shed light on differences, contexts, relations, and meanings. The talk discusses individual, communal, and political roles of recovery and take the use of the concept beyond the discourse of free will, responsibility or an institutional treatment outcome. To achieve this, I ask what makes recovery a contested concept, how can we approach it differently, and whether there is a need to talk about recovery at all, especially in semiotic, sociomaterial, and relational forms. Merging biomedical, social-psychological, and environmental dimensions, recovery in itself is a delicate concept to study. The talk will draw on findings published in my first book “Recovering Assemblages” that tells a number of stories of recovery of young people from Azerbaijan and Germany and shows the erratic, arbitrary, ambiguous character of their recovery experiences. Empowered by theories in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and ground breaking works of many critical drug scholars on rethinking new ways on how to approach concepts of addiction, drug use and recovery, the book gradually builds from material aspects and semiotic and sociomaterial relations, to cultural and structural dimensions informing national drug discourses.