ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0886-7069
Current Organisation
La Trobe University
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Sociology | Sociology and Social Studies of Science and Technology |
Law Reform | Substance Abuse | Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Social Structure and Health | Health Inequalities | Infectious Diseases
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-09-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2012
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-02-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2010
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-08-2014
DOI: 10.1111/DAR.12178
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-12-2021
DOI: 10.1177/00914509211065141
Abstract: Global momentum for drug law reform is building. But how might such reform be achieved? Many argue that human rights offer a possible normative framework for guiding such reform. There has been very little research on whether human rights processes can actually achieve such aims, however. This paper responds to this knowledge gap. It explores how one human rights mechanism—the “parliamentary rights scrutiny process”—deals with alcohol and other drugs. We consider how four Australian parliaments scrutinized proposed new laws that would deal with alcohol and other drugs for their human rights “compatibility.” We find that laws that would limit the rights of people who use alcohol and other drugs were routinely seen as justifiable on the basis that alcohol and other drugs were inherently “unsafe.” Crucially, safety was conceptualized in a gender-neutral way, without regard to the potential role of gender, including specific masculinities, in the production of phenomena such as family violence and sexual violence and other public safety problems. Instead, such problems were regularly constituted as consequences, simply, of alcohol or other drug consumption. In making this argument, we build on the pioneering work of David Moore and colleagues (e.g., 2020). Their work asks important questions about how the causes of violence are constituted across different settings, including research and policy. Drawing on ideas from scholars such as Carol Bacchi and John Law, they identify “gendering practices” and “collateral realities” in research and policy on violence, in which the role of men and masculinities are routinely obscured, displaced or rendered invisible. We find similar problems underway within human rights law. In highlighting these gendering practices and collateral realities, we aim to draw attention to the limitations of some human rights processes and the need for more work in this area.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-11-2013
Abstract: The recent growth of so-called stem cell tourism reflects the high optimism that currently surrounds stem cell science. Stem cell treatments for various conditions are increasingly advertised over the Internet as being available at hospitals and clinics around the world. However, most are clinically unproven. Despite numerous warnings from scientists about the dangers posed by such treatments, many in iduals are evidently prepared to take the risk, sometimes on more than one occasion. This article explores the dynamics of hope that underpin stem cell tourism. Drawing on ideas from the sociology of hope, as applied to biomedicine, the article explores how hope is constructed and shapes actions in relation to stem cell treatments. Making reference to the findings from an Australian study of patients and carers who travelled overseas to receive stem cell treatments, it is argued that hope has an ambiguous significance in the context of deregulated health care. As we explain, this has implications for patients' and carers' treatment decisions and experiences. The findings are discussed in light of current responses to stem cell tourism.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2022
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-06-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-02-2017
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2009
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2009.07.023
Abstract: Endometriosis is a chronic gynaecological condition of uncertain aetiology characterised by menstrual irregularities. Several studies have previously identified a lengthy delay experienced by patients between the first onset of symptoms and eventual diagnosis. Various explanations have been advanced for the diagnostic delay, with both doctors and women being implicated. Such explanations include that doctors normalise women's menstrual pain and that women might delay in seeking medical advice because they have difficulty distinguishing between 'normal' and 'abnormal' menstruation. It has been suggested that the diagnostic delay could be reduced if women were trained in how to distinguish between 'normal' and 'abnormal' menstrual cycles. In this paper I argue that whilst these may be factors in the diagnostic delay, women's reluctance to disclose problems associated with their menstrual cycle may be a more significant and hitherto neglected factor. I argue women are reluctant to disclose menstrual irregularities because menstruation is a 'discrediting attribute' (Goffman, 1963) and disclosure renders women vulnerable to stigmatisation. Women actively conceal their menstrual irregularities through practices of the 'menstrual etiquette' (Laws, 1990) which involves the strategic concealment of menstrual problems. This argument is supported through an analysis of the experiences of 20 Australian women diagnosed with endometriosis. The ramifications of this analysis for chronic pain conditions more generally and for practical strategies designed to address the endometriosis diagnostic delay are considered.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-07-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2009
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 14-07-2023
DOI: 10.1136/MEDHUM-2023-012653
Abstract: Since the advent of more effective, new-generation treatment for hepatitis C, immense resources have been devoted to delivering cure to as many people with the virus as possible. The scale-up of treatment aims to prevent liver disease, liver cancer and onward transmission of hepatitis C, but social research shows that people also approach treatment with its social promises in mind, including the hope that it might reduce or eradicate stigma from their lives. Such hopes reflect broader ideas about medical cure, which is seen as an end point to illness and its effects, and capable of restoring the self to a (previous) state of health and well-being. But what does cure mean among people for whom treatment does not produce an end to the social effects of a heavily stigmatised disease? While new treatments promise to eliminate hepatitis C, accounts of post-cure life suggest that hepatitis C can linger in various ways. This article draws on interviews with people who have undergone treatment with direct-acting antivirals (n=30) in Australia to explore the meanings they attach to cure and their experiences of post-cure life. We argue that dominant biomedical understandings of cure as an ‘ending’ and a ‘restoration’ can foreclose insight into the social and other effects of illness that linger after medical cure, and how in iduals grapple with those afterlives. Drawing on recent conceptual re-framings of cure from medical anthropology and disability studies, we suggest that thinking at the limits of ‘curative reason’ helps to better address the afterlives of chronic illness. In the case of hepatitis C, reconceptualising cure could inform improved and less stigmatising ways of addressing people’s post-cure needs. And in the era of hepatitis C elimination, such reconceptualisation is increasingly important as the cohort of people undergoing treatment and cure expands worldwide.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 15-03-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2010
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-06-2020
Abstract: In recent years there have been significant changes in global drug policy. This article considers these developments. I provide a brief introduction to the history of global drug policy, followed by an overview of the current state of play, both in Australia and abroad. Inspired by a recent injunction by New South Wales Deputy Coroner Harriet Grahame to think differently about drug problems, I then consider whether we are asking the right questions in current debates about the future direction of drug policy, and whether our policy priorities need to change.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2023
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-05-2014
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2017
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2017.05.008
Abstract: This paper examines a discrete set of issues pertaining to the constitution of addiction in law. Based on qualitative interviews undertaken with lawyers in Australia and Canada, I examine how addiction figures in lawyers' daily practice. Drawing on ideas from science and technology studies scholars Sheila Jasanoff, Michael Lynch and Bruno Latour, and building on recent research I undertook on legal addiction veridiction, I explore the constitution of addiction 'facts' in law. I examine how and when lawyers claim to make decisions about addiction in the course of their legal practice. Lawyers report playing a central role in the making of decisions about addiction, at multiple stages of the legal process including: before taking cases on, while running cases in court, and while negotiating and/or settling cases. I argue that these decisions can be properly described as 'quasi-expert' determinations with important parallels to scientific, technological and medical claims often made in legal settings by more conventional 'expert witnesses'. I call these 'quasi-expert' decisions because they are decisions of the kind that might be assumed to be the purview of scientific or medical experts and because they have tangible implications for clients. Lawyers uniquely constitute addiction in unique ways, drawing on a combination of factors, including their own experience with and observations about addiction, the experiences of family members who have experienced alcohol and other drug problems, relevant legal concepts and frameworks, popular and scientific claims about addiction, emotions and values, including the gender politics of alcohol and other drug addiction. These addiction 'facts' can have a range of material and discursive effects, including potentially adverse implications for people characterised as 'addicts'. I conclude the paper with a discussion of some implications of these practices, and with reflections on how we might address these issues in future research.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-09-2022
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-09-2020
DOI: 10.1007/S10459-019-09914-4
Abstract: While University students increasingly participate in work-integrated learning (WIL), their dignity is often violated during WIL. The current literature is limited in so far as it typically focuses on student perspectives within healthcare contexts and does not use the concept of 'dignity'. Instead, this study explored student and supervisor perspectives on student dignity during WIL across healthcare and non-healthcare disciplines. Research questions included: What are: (1) types of student dignity experiences and patterns by groups (2) factors contributing to experiences (3) consequences of experiences? Sixty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted using narrative interviewing techniques with 30 supervisors and 46 students from healthcare (medicine, nursing and counselling) and non-healthcare (business, law and education) disciplines. Data were analyzed using framework analysis. Nine common narrative types were identified within 344 stories: verbal abuse, right for learning opportunities, care, inclusion, reasonable expectations, right for appropriate feedback, equality, trust, and right to be informed. Factors contributing to dignity experiences and consequences were often at the in idual level (e.g. student/supervisor characteristics). We found some salient differences in perceptions of experiences between students and supervisors, but few differences between healthcare and non-healthcare disciplines. This study extends WIL research based on student perspectives in healthcare, and provides practice and further research guidance to enhance student dignity during WIL.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 19-12-2017
DOI: 10.1111/ADD.14105
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2015
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2020
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2023
Abstract: Modern health‐care systems have customarily approached hepatitis C in ways that resemble the public health approach to HIV/AIDS known as ‘HIV exceptionalism’. HIV exceptionalism describes the unusual emphasis on privacy, confidentiality and consent in approaches to HIV and was partly developed to address HIV/AIDS‐related stigma. In the case of hepatitis C, exceptionalist approaches have included diagnosis and treatment by specialist physicians and other ‘boutique’ public health strategies. The recent availability of highly effective, direct‐acting antivirals alongside goals to eliminate hepatitis C have heralded dramatic changes to hepatitis C health care, including calls for its ‘normalisation’. The corollary to exceptionalism, normalisation aims to bring hepatitis C into routine, mainstream health care. This article draws on interviews with stakeholders ( n = 30) who work with hepatitis C‐affected communities in policy, community, legal and advocacy settings in Australia, alongside Fraser et al.’s (2017, International Journal of Drug Policy , 44, 192–201) theorisation of stigma, and Rosenbrock et al.’s (1999, The AIDS policy cycle in Western Europe: from exceptionalism to normalisation . WZB Discussion Paper, No. P 99‐202) critique of normalisation to consider the perceived effects of hepatitis C normalisation. Stakeholders described normalisation as a stigma‐reducing process. However, they also expressed concerns about the ongoing stigma and discrimination that is not ameliorated by normalisation. We suggest that in centring normalisation, changes in health care may exaggerate the power of technological solutions to transform the meanings of hepatitis C.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-07-2022
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221115698
Abstract: New drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C have emerged. There is great optimism within medicine about the transformative potential of cure, but this overlooks the entrenched discrimination and stigma associated with both hepatitis C and injecting drug use and the role of law in re roducing it. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders such as policymakers, lawyers, and representatives from peer organisations (N = 30), Latour’s (2013) work on legal veridiction, Fraser and Seear’s (2011) conceptualisation of hepatitis C as a ‘gathering’, and Mol’s (2021) work on being, this paper explores the possibility that legal processes complicate the linear trajectory of progress and transformation cure promises. Our participants’ identify various legal processes that allow hepatitis C to echo or linger in people’s lives after treatment. These processes are remaking hepatitis C, and making perpetual hepatitis C subjects. We argue that we must grapple with these forces in the era of cure.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-07-2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-12-2020
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 18-10-2022
Abstract: In recent years, highly tolerable and effective drugs have emerged promising a radical new ‘post‐hepatitis C’ world. Optimism about medical cure potentially overlooks discrimination and stigma associated with hepatitis C and injecting drug use. Legal frameworks are especially relevant to hepatitis futures, since the law has the potential to reinforce or alleviate stigma and discrimination. This article explores how hepatitis C figures in Australian criminal law and with what potential effects. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s work on legal veridiction, Alison Kafer’s work on futurity and disability and case law data collected for a major study on hepatitis C and post‐cure lives, we explore how the criminal law handles hepatitis C in the age of cure. We find that law complicates cure, constituting hepatitis C as disabling despite the advent of effective cures. The law steadfastly maintains its own approach to disease, disability and illness, untouched by medical and scientific developments, in ways that might complicate straightforwardly linear imaginaries of cure, transformation and progress of the kind that dominate biomedicine. We explore the implications of these tensions between law and medicine.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2015
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2015.05.014
Abstract: The law is a key site for the production of meanings around the 'problem' of drugs in public discourse. In this article, we critically consider the material-discursive 'effects' of laws prohibiting peer distribution of needles and syringes in Australia. Taking the laws and regulations governing possession and distribution of injecting equipment in one jurisdiction (New South Wales, Australia) as a case study, we use Carol Bacchi's poststructuralist approach to policy analysis to critically consider the assumptions and presuppositions underpinning this legislative and regulatory framework, with a particular focus on examining the discursive, subjectification and lived effects of these laws. We argue that legislative prohibitions on the distribution of injecting equipment except by 'authorised persons' within 'approved programs' constitute people who inject drugs as irresponsible, irrational, and untrustworthy and re-inscribe a familiar stereotype of the drug 'addict'. These constructions of people who inject drugs fundamentally constrain how the provision of injecting equipment may be thought about in policy and practice. We suggest that prohibitions on the distribution of injecting equipment among peers may also have other, material, effects and may be counterproductive to various public health aims and objectives. However, the actions undertaken by some people who inject drugs to distribute equipment to their peers may disrupt and challenge these constructions, through a counter-discourse in which people who inject drugs are constituted as active agents with a vital role to play in blood-borne virus prevention in the community. Such activity continues to bring with it the risk of criminal prosecution, and so it remains a vexed issue. These insights have implications of relevance beyond Australia, particularly for other countries around the world that prohibit peer distribution, but also for other legislative practices with material-discursive effects in association with injecting drug use.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2011
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2017
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2016.10.002
Abstract: As the number of new 'psychoactive substances' detected globally has risen exponentially, the policy response of assessing and prohibiting each new substance in idually has become increasingly unworkable. In an attempt to disrupt the availability of new as-yet-unscheduled substances, Ireland (2010), Poland (2011), Romania (2012), New Zealand (2013), Australia (2015) and the United Kingdom (2016) have enacted generic or blanket ban legislation that prohibits all 'psychoactive substances' that are not already regulated or belong to exempt categories. How such generic legislation defines 'psychoactive substance' is therefore crucial. While there is a growing critical literature relating to blanket bans of 'psychoactive substances', the Australian legislation is yet to be described or critically analysed. In this commentary, we aim to draw the attention of local and international drug policy scholars to Australia's newest legislative approach to 'psychoactive substances'. Using the Australian experience as a case study, we first describe and trace the origins of this generic banning approach, especially focusing on how 'psychoactive effect' came to be defined. Then, we critically examine the assumptions underpinning this definition and the possibilities silenced by it, drawing on the work of poststructuralist and critical scholars. In doing so, we explore and raise a series of questions about how this legislation works to stabilise drugs, drug harms and drug effects, as well as addiction realities how the category of 'psychoactive substances' is produced through this legislation and some of the material-discursive effects which accompany this rendering of the 'problem'. We offer this commentary not as a comprehensive discussion of each of these elements but rather as a starting-point to promote further discussion and debate within the drug policy field. To this end, we conclude with a suggested research agenda that may help guide such future work.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-08-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 14-08-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-09-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-01-2022
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 17-06-2016
Abstract: em Australian criminal law is being actively reconfigured in an effort to produce a more effective response to the problem of alcohol-related violence. This article uses the /em Safe Night Out Legislation Amendment Act 2014 em (Qld) as a case study for two purposes: i) to introduce a set of conceptual tools and typologies that can be used to investigate the relationship between ‘intoxication’ and criminal law and ii) to raise a number of concerns about how the effects of alcohol and other drugs are implicated in laws governing police powers, criminal responsibility and punishment. We draw attention to the different and sometimes inconsistent ways in which significance is attached to evidence of the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, as well as to variations and ambiguities in how legislation attempts to capture the degree of impairment or effects that are regarded as warranting the attachment of criminal law significance. /em
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2009
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-07-2020
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2014
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2014.02.016
Abstract: Much academic scholarship has explored drug use and 'addiction' in the criminal justice system. This paper explores what happens when 'addicts' are victims, through an analysis of victims of crime compensation case law within the state of Victoria, Australia. We argue that the law enacts a set of unexamined assumptions about the 'problem' of addiction, including the assumption that it is incompatible to be both addict and victim. However, courts reconcile this 'dilemma' by explaining addiction as an 'effect' of trauma, violence or abuse, a seemingly sympathetic rendering of addiction. Although this appears to represent a less stigmatising approach than found in the criminal law, we argue that these processes actually produce new challenges for people who use drugs and 'addicts', and that these may be counter to the stated aims and objectives of crimes compensation law. We argue that even legal systems with an explicitly remedial rationale have the potential to generate harms, creating those who use drugs and 'addicts' as pathological in certain ways and thereby undermining their claims to citizenship. Our analysis is underpinned by a critical approach to the constitution of social problems based on the work of Carol Bacchi. Although the focus is on Australian law, the arguments we develop in this paper are likely to resonate beyond the specific jurisdiction reviewed here, and raise questions about the mutually interdependent role of law and policy in compounding the stigmatisation and marginalisation of people who use drugs and drug 'addicts'.
Start Date: 2017
End Date: 08-2020
Amount: $472,500.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2021
End Date: 12-2023
Amount: $560,286.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 01-2021
End Date: 03-2025
Amount: $1,034,020.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 03-2016
End Date: 03-2020
Amount: $323,088.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity