Readdressing Addiction Stigma: Making Space for Being in the World Differently

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Dennis, Fay. 2025. Readdressing Addiction Stigma: Making Space for Being in the World Differently. In: Gareth M. Thomas; Oli Williams; Tanisha Spratt and Amy Chandler, eds. Recalibrating Stigma: Sociologies of Health and Illness. Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 123-138. ISBN 9781529235821 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

In this chapter, the author develops thinking from their monograph, Injecting Bodies in More-than-Human Worlds. They take up an understanding of stigma as relational and explore the ways that people who use drugs are prevented from living full lives: not through their drug use but through these toxic connections. Exploring three such events of ‘blocked becoming’, the chapter conceptualises stigma as a life-limiting socio-material process. Where a narrow understanding of stigma as socially produced has led scholars and activists to look to science and ‘matter’ as a way out, this research highlights the limits of such an approach. Posing the medical category of addiction as a problem rather than a solution to stigma, the author considers how people who use drugs think of and inhabit their drug use as an alternative way of being, refusing pathology. It is by better attuning to and responding to these modes that destigmatisation can take place.

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Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529235838.ch007