ORCID Profile
0000-0003-4785-484X
Current Organisation
University of New South Wales
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Social Policy | Sociology | Applied Ethics | Bioethics (human and animal) | Policy and Administration | Health Policy | Counselling, Welfare and Community Services | Sociology not elsewhere classified | Sociology of Education | Sociology and Social Studies of Science and Technology |
Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Social Structure and Health | Community Service (excl. Work) not elsewhere classified | Bioethics | Children's/Youth Services and Childcare | Law Reform | Health Inequalities | Infectious Diseases
Publisher: Policy Press
Date: 30-04-2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 14-10-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-04-2020
Abstract: Programs and policies are increasingly framed by the logics of “evidence-based policy,” a term subject to critical scrutiny and change after it emerged as an explicit valuing of specific types of quantitative data as objective, and a devaluing of most types of qualitative data. The transfer of “evidence-based” approaches to drug policy was mobilized by a distrust of people who use drugs, and of people who work with them. This distrust remains important, but contemporary policy also mobilizes in idual narratives and lived experience through the growing use of biographical stories. Contemporary drug policy, like other policy areas, is also increasingly constituted by changing forms of technology, through new types of data use and data linkage, and of digital and social media. In this article, we consider the current and likely future impacts of changes to policy. We examine two Australian policies: the Australian Priority Investment Approach to Welfare (Try, Test and Learn), and the child protection reform, Their Futures Matter. Both use the “investment approach” to calculate policy costs and aims, represent important developments in the policy figuring of populations, and affect the well-being of many people who use drugs. Based on analysis of these policies, and interviews with people who use drugs who participated in a qualitative study on blood-borne virus serodiscordance, we ask, what are the likely effects, risks, and benefits of these changes for people who use drugs and others subject to public scrutiny and distrust? We argue that as long as the stigmatization of drug use remains prevalent, it is unlikely that the potential for more sophisticated and just recognition of the complexity of drug use will find a place in the forms of information and knowledge recognized in policy as evidence.
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2018
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2018.10.011
Abstract: The idea of identifying and monitoring urinary excretion of illicit drugs and their metabolites in wastewater has been seen by governments and international organisations as 'promising'. It is claimed that such approaches will enable governments to effectively direct resources to priority areas, monitor the progress of demand and supply reduction strategies, as well as identify emerging trends. Drawing on poststructural approaches to policy analysis and insights from science and technology studies, we consider how the technology of wastewater analysis may be seen as a kind of proposal with productive capacity and constitutive effects. Through this analysis, we seek to raise ontopolitical questions about the production of data by interrogating the claims to 'accuracy' promoted in wastewater analysis, and illuminating the assumptions underpinning such pursuits. By taking an approach which sees method as performative rather than as descriptive of a pre-existing reality, we consider how wastewater analysis enacts realities into being in the drugs field. Taking Australia's National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program as a case ex le, we argue that wastewater analysis constitutes drug use as measurable, countable and comparable and, in doing so, enacts a homogenous drug using population in a bounded geographical space, with implications for drug policy. Furthermore, the claim to 'accuracy' constitutes people who use drugs as lacking in knowledge and unaware, and relates to a range of practices which work to continually re-produce people who use drugs as criminal, untrustworthy and in need of surveillance. Through this analysis, we seek to generate critical discussion about practices of 'evidence-making', the privileging of 'scientific data' in drug policy processes (especially as it relates to population prevalence of drug use), and the hitherto unexamined effects of wastewater analysis for drug policy.
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 16-06-2023
DOI: 10.1136/MEDHUM-2022-012382
Abstract: A virus has a social history. In the case of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV, this history is one involving stigma and discrimination, advocacy and activism, and recent dramatic improvements in treatment. These social histories influence the experience of people who live with the viruses, and those who work with them. One aspect of this is the impact of social changes on the biographical disruption and integration brought about by illness. Healthcare practitioners who see significant improvements in the effectiveness of treatment for a condition over the course of their professional life will incorporate those changes into their own history and their relationship to that condition. This article is based on a study of the experiences of serodiscordance, or mixed infection status, in families living with HIV and two types of viral hepatitis, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The article explores the perspectives of healthcare workers who work with people affected by these viruses, who were asked about their experiences in working with serodiscordance in families. Interviews revealed that changing social meanings given to bloodborne viruses, and changes to treatment over time, held a significant place in the accounts that service providers gave of their work. In asking them to describe their work with HIV and HCV, we were also asking about work that has been shaped by changing patterns and sources of stigma, and recently reshaped by changes in treatment and outcomes. While typically the experiences of patients and their families are used to investigate the social histories of diagnosis and stigma, the professional perspectives and life stories of the service providers who work with them are also revealing. We heard accounts in which histories as well as current regimes were prominent, illuminated further by insights from the sociology of health on narrative and biographical disruption.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2003
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2009
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-2008
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2018
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 19-06-2018
Abstract: Over the last few decades feminists, science and technology studies scholars and others have grappled with how to take materiality into account in understanding social practices, subjectivity and events. One key area for these debates has been drug use and addiction. At the same time, neuroscientific accounts of drug use and addiction have also arisen. This development has attracted criticism as simplistically reinstating material determinism. In this article we draw on 80 interviews with health professionals directly involved in drug-related public policy and service provision in three countries to identify the main ways the neuroscience of addiction (and thus the agency of the brain) is understood. We analyse these understandings using contemporary posthumanist theory to develop new options for conceptualizing matter in public responses to addiction. We close by calling for a new approach to addiction and the brain based on a process model of materiality and public debate.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2011
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.1792135
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2017
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2010
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2010.06.010
Abstract: Classic studies of medicalisation point to the 'rise of the experts' as disempowering patients and refusing to acknowledge their expertise in their own lives. More recently, medicalisation scholarship has taken a different turn, arguing that patient choice is both a responsibility imposed on patients, and a driver of medicalisation. To what extent does autism, a childhood developmental disorder in which parents are invited to take a close role, instantiate these different manifestations of medicalisation? This paper reports on a qualitative study of parents' experience of diagnosis and treatment, conducted in four states in Australia in 2008-2009. It draws on 49 interviews with parents of young children with autism, and with early intervention service providers and clinicians. Our study shows that the importance of choice in decisions around treatment cannot be subsumed under the single category of disenfranchisement or engagement. The erse responses of parents to the diffuse, complex field of autism treatment illustrate an admixture of consumption, advocacy and education driving contemporary medicalisation.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2008
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2007.08.001
Abstract: While the pleasures of drug use are sometimes acknowledged, they are normally limited to those who are socially privileged. The drug use of those who are impoverished and marginalised is linked instead to crime, social misery and addiction. Studying poverty in connection with drug use enriches our understanding of both poverty and drugs, but there are limitations to these connections, including their neglect of pleasure. This paper draws on 85 qualitative interviews with service providers and clients, conducted for a project entitled 'Comparing the role of takeaways in methadone maintenance treatment in New South Wales and Victoria'. Critical readings of psychoanalysis are used as a conceptual frame. Although pleasurable and problematic drug use are often thought to be mutually exclusive, pleasure is reported from both the effects of drugs such as heroin and methadone, and from the social worlds of methadone maintenance treatment. Attention to drug users' narratives of pleasure has the potential for new understandings of drug use and social disadvantage. Common distinctions between kinds of drug use, such as problematic and recreational, are less useful than is normally thought.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2018.07.009
Abstract: Policy concern with families has led to the framing of 'good parenting' as a skill set that parents must acquire while 'poor parenting' is linked to a raft of social problems, including child maltreatment. A range of professionals are responsible for monitoring parents for evidence of 'poor parenting', and for reporting those parents to statutory child protection authorities. Little is known about how parents in vulnerable circumstances negotiate these dual pressures of 'good parenting' and surveillance. Eight parents who use drugs were interviewed about raising children well. The data is drawn from a project that used a positive deviance approach to understand the practices and norms that contribute to positive child outcomes in communities where positive outcomes are unexpected or statistically anomalous. Parents use a range of strategies to minimise risk of harm from drug use. Participants resist negative stereotypes that portray their parenting primarily in terms of risk and in contrast to previous research, describe feelings of guilt but not shame. Systemic barriers to safe environments include the nature of illicit drug markets and the surveillance and policing responsibilities of service agencies. The findings contribute to an understanding of safe and competent parenting by parents who use drugs and highlight how drug laws and fear of intervention can work against the creation of safe family environments.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-07-2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 03-07-2015
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746415000342
Abstract: This article traces changes in the descriptions of entrenched social disadvantage, and changes in the way that social description is conceptualised and measured. The article is also an analysis of the importance of categories and categorisation to social policy research an importance which is recognised relatively rarely. Its focus is on the growing importance of multiplicity as a mode for measuring and conceptualising disadvantage. It argues that multiplicity has become important in social policy, and traces distinct trends in research and policy over the last half-century, and their convergence at particular moments. The rise of multiplicity as a trope for understanding social disadvantage has the effect of rendering social problems as more ‘wicked’ and intractable than they were previously understood to be. The strengths of this are in the sophistication of theoretical, multidisciplinary conceptualisations of disadvantage and the disadvantaged. There may be costs to this, however, in policy responses to addressing people's needs.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-12-2009
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: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
Date: 28-04-2017
Publisher: Hindawi Limited
Date: 2017
DOI: 10.1155/2017/4352783
Abstract: The concept of “serodiscordance” (mixed infection status) is primarily associated with epidemiological concerns about HIV transmission risk in couples. We make the case for extending this concept to include families with mixed HIV and viral hepatitis status. Social research on couples with mixed HIV and hepatitis C status has laid an important foundation for illuminating how experiences of serodiscordance within intimate partnerships are much broader than concerns about risk. This body of work attests to serodiscordance holding promise as a valuable concept for understanding viral infections as socially situated and intensely relational phenomena. However, serodiscordance is still limited as a concept because of its near universal focus on couples. It is rarely applied to wider relationships, including family networks beyond the couple. Despite evidence in the literature that families are affected by blood-borne viruses in multiple social, emotional, financial, and generational ways, the concept of serodiscordance does not capture these broader dynamics. Making serodiscordance more inclusive is an important step in recognising the erse ways families’ everyday lives, relationships, and futures can be entangled with HIV, hepatitis C, and hepatitis B, and for understanding how today’s era of effective treatment options might shape the “family life” of viral infections.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2011
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2014418
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-12-2022
DOI: 10.1177/10497323221144923
Abstract: Adverse childhood experiences, including childhood sexual abuse, have significant immediate and lifelong effects including higher risks of alcohol and other drug use and contact with the criminal justice system. The concept of trauma to describe adverse experiences and later behaviours provides potential to reshape prevention and responses for victims. We draw on survivor accounts to a national enquiry, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, to examine the ways in which trauma is narrated in adverse childhood experiences, alcohol and other drug use and contact with the criminal justice system, and how trauma is interpreted by others in the context of policy and legal findings. These accounts showed damaging and unjust experiences of childhood, which were compounded by subsequent contact with the criminal justice system. Trauma seems to be important to both the experienced narrated by survivors and the synthesising of these experiences into narratives. National enquiries play important roles in listening to survivors and advocating for reform. There is a risk, however, that they will fail to result in substantive change, and function primarily as a forum for bearing witness to trauma, but not preventing it.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2006
Abstract: This article combines in-depth interviews and Karen Barad's work on materiality to think about the ways in which the materiality of blood might be understood in relation to sociality and blood-borne virus prevention among BDSM (bondage and domination, dominance and submission and sadomasochism) body modification practitioners in Sydney, Australia. In doing so, it confronts questions of how the materiality of blood can be theorized in ways that neither presume a fixed, a priori ontological status or essence, nor exclude it from an active role in the production of realities. In taking account of both its co-constitutive role in practice, and its figurative power (as flow) in understanding the mind/body, discourse/materiality conjunctions at work in BDSM body modification practice, we aim to illuminate further the imbrication of materiality and meaning, and generate a more complex and fruitful account of blood for the purposes of blood-borne virus prevention and education.
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2017
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2017
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2017
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2018
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 05-09-2011
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-07-2009
Abstract: Despite the controversial nature of illicit drug treatment, there is a relative lack of research on policy formation in this area. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with service providers and analysis of policy documents, conducted for an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council funded project entitled `Comparing the role of takeaways in methadone maintenance treatment in New South Wales and Victoria', to examine the formation and implementation of drug treatment policy. In particular, it considers two forces widely acknowledged to be important to drug treatment, and often argued to be antithetical to each other: community values and scientific evidence. Separation of the `social' and the `scientific' in treatment is a much-used but conceptually limited distinction. Two alternatives to evidence-based policy are proposed. The first, values-based policy, is increasingly important to critical discussions of social policy and could potentially add much to debates around drug treatment policy. The second alternative is suggested by social studies of science (STS), in particular feminist STS.
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 08-2022
DOI: 10.1332/204674321X16297270094275
Abstract: When young women who have grown up in contact with child protection become mothers, they shift from being regarded as a child ‘at risk’ by the child protection system, to posing ‘a risk’ to their baby. In contrast to their peers, young care leavers transition to adulthood with very few resources and little support they typically continue to experience the economic and related adversities of their childhoods. This article draws on biographical narrative interviews with young Australian mothers to understand how they navigate child protection as new mothers. We argue that, while inequalities endure, new understandings of the system can be acquired and dispositions can adapt to function more effectively in the field of child protection. We draw on Bourdieu’s notions of capital, habitus and field to analyse young mothers' adaptations, with additional insights from Hester’s analogy of separate planets to explore their experiences of the field of child protection.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2007
Abstract: This ar ticle considers the operations of methadone maintenance treatment through the use of concepts proposed by actor-network theor y and historical ontology. The former provokes a concern with the co-constitution of treatment regimes by various actors, including non-human actants.The latter provokes a concern with the creation of new identities. Analysis of methadone often examines treatment as a nether world, and clients as neither addicted nor autonomous.The analysis under taken here instead emphasizes what is produced in methadone maintenance treatment, rather than the inexactness of existing categories. It considers four identities produced through methadone treatment: the dissatisfied customer the stable user the in idual in need of guidance and the lay carer. This analysis enables a study of what and who is produced through treatment in terms that problematize simple distinctions between good and bad, addicted and independent, stable and chaotic.
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: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2003
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2018
Publisher: JSTOR
Date: 04-2003
DOI: 10.2307/20059135
Publisher: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
Date: 04-2019
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Publisher: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
Date: 14-02-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-12-2022
Start Date: 2021
End Date: 12-2023
Amount: $560,286.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 12-2015
End Date: 03-2019
Amount: $216,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 06-2016
End Date: 12-2020
Amount: $307,550.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 10-2021
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $485,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity