Senior lecturer in Criminology, The School of Law and Criminology, University of Greenwich, Queen Mary Building room 217, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, London SE10 9LS, UK.
Lecturer in Criminology, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK.
Int J Drug Policy. 2021 Dec;98:103096. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.103096. Epub 2021 Jan 12.
Grounded in intersubjective participatory action research, the people and dancefloors project has sought to produce a space for the co-creation of knowledge about dancefloors and drug taking, building a platform for developing insights from the positionality of current drug users. Through film, it provides hermeneutic insight while legitimising their voices. In this paper, we share some reflections as researchers/users/activists arising from our involvement in the project. To begin with, we reflect on the motivations for the project, and the epistemic suppositions that animated it. This is followed by conversational style interviews where we re-evaluate our position in light of the project, with a particular focus on the tensions that drug use introduces between professional, personal and political domains in our lives. These reflections are useful to people who use drugs and hold privilege by nature of their social and cultural position. While questioning the silencing of personal experiences in relation to drug use, we also react to some of the traditional tendencies of academia, including institutionalised individualism, which isolates researchers and discourages them from finding political collectivity, and the subjectivist/objectivist dichotomy, which supports a tendency to objectify research participants while removing the self from the equation. Despite the challenges that arise from disentangling our multiple experiences and identities, our intersubjective dialogue inspires deeper learning about ourselves and each other, encouraging us towards a more openly political stance.
本研究根植于主体间参与行动研究，旨在为舞池和药物使用相关知识的共同创造提供空间，为当前药物使用者的定位提供一个洞察平台。通过电影，该研究提供了解释学见解，同时使他们的声音合法化。在本文中，我们作为研究人员/使用者/活动家，分享了一些来自项目参与的反思。首先，我们反思了项目的动机和激发它的认识论假设。接下来是对话风格的访谈，我们根据项目重新评估自己的立场，特别关注药物使用在我们生活中的专业、个人和政治领域之间带来的紧张关系。这些反思对于那些由于社会和文化地位而自然拥有特权的药物使用者来说是有用的。在质疑与药物使用有关的个人经历被沉默的同时，我们也对学术界的一些传统倾向做出反应，包括制度化的个人主义，它使研究人员孤立无援，并阻止他们寻找政治集体性，以及主体/客体二分法，它支持将研究参与者客体化的倾向，同时将自我从等式中移除。尽管从我们的多种经验和身份中解脱出来带来了挑战，但我们的主体间对话激发了我们对彼此更深入的了解，鼓励我们采取更开放的政治立场。
