Keynote Speakers

Dr Emmanuel Kuntsche
'Understanding the weekend drinking of young adults from an “events” perspective: The possibilities and limitations of using personal cell phones'

This presentation examines the emerging use of personal cell phones in quantitative research on drinking events amongst young people. Much existing knowledge on patterns of alcohol consumption is based on retrospective-recall methodologies. Such methods are cost-efficient and convenient but are limited in their capacity to record important data on the specific circumstances of alcohol consumption events as they emerge in time and space. By contrast, personal cell phones and particularly current smartphone technology, widely adopted throughout the world and particularly by young adults, offer many exciting possibilities for tracking these circumstances. To explore these possibilities, as well as their limitations, I draw on a range of recent and ongoing studies that use the internet-based cell-phone optimised assessment technique, or ICAT, which consists of a series of internet-stored questionnaires completed by participants on their personal cell phone browsers. These studies focus on how aspects of the social and physical environment unfold in real time, which has led to more comprehensive understandings of the interactions between the various factors shaping alcohol use during drinking events. For example, I show how alcohol consumption progresses from one hour to the next on weekend evenings in a sample of young adults in Switzerland, how evenings with excessive drinking patterns can be identified and how personal drinking motives, pre-drinking, time spent in bars and the number of friends present all shape drinking events. I also discuss some ethical questions that emerge when data is collected via personal cell phones.

Dr Emmanuel Kuntsche is a senior researcher at Addiction Switzerland, a research institute based in Lausanne, an Associate Professor at the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands), and a lecturer at the Universities of Budapest (Hungary) and Bamberg (Germany). He is also the Secretary of the Swiss Alcohol Research Foundation and an Assistant Editor for the journals Addiction and Drug and Alcohol Review. His chief research interests are the motivations of young people engaging in drinking, and the physical and social environments in which alcohol and other substance use occurs. Dr Kuntsche has directed or contributed to more than 30 national and international research projects. He has published more than 250 scientific articles, book chapters and research reports, and has contributed to more than 150 conferences and scientific meetings (55 as an invited keynote speaker). Dr Kuntsche has received career awards and personal support from the International Kettil Bruun Society for Social and Epidemiological Research on Alcohol (KBS), the German Society for Addiction Research and Addiction Treatment (DG Sucht), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Dr Eugene Raikhel
'Coding conduct: Hypnosis and the affective economy of Russian addiction medicine'

Over the past decade or more, a range of scholars concerned with substance use have attended to addiction therapeutics to examine contemporary enactments of personhood and agency, subject-formation, forms of sociality, and transformations in definitions of health and pathology. Much of this literature has focused on clinical interventions as technologies which produce self-governing and autonomous subjects, leaving open the question of how we might conceptualise more ambivalent and subtle relationships between interventions and political rationalities. In this paper, I address this question through an account of ‘coding’ – a group of controversial clinical techniques for alcoholism, widely used in Russia, which attempt to facilitate sobriety by managing patients’ affective states. Specifically, many practitioners of coding employ hypnotic suggestion in a ritualised performance meant to associate drinking with the threat of death. Critics have argued that this reliance on fear undermines these methods both on the grounds of ethics and efficacy. I argue that such clinical technologies are both sites where contemporary Russian ideas about authority and autonomy are made and remade, and part of a broader affective economy. More generally, I examine the relationship between clinicians and patients in the context of the complex Russian political and social order under Putin, in which responsibility, initiative and personal sovereignty are affirmed as necessary traits within certain spheres, even as relationships of beneficence and obligation are valorised in others.

Dr Eugene Raikhel (Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago) is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. He is particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. His work follows therapeutic technologies as they move both from 'bench to bedside' and from one cultural or institutional setting to another, examining how they intersect with the lives of practitioners and patients. He is completing a book entitled Selling Sobriety: Alcoholism and the Post-Soviet Clinic, which is based on fourteen months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg among institutions dealing with substance use. The book examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and addiction in Russia over the past twenty years. Dr Raikhel also founded and edits Somatosphere, a collaborative academic website focused on the social sciences and humanities of medicine, health, and science.

Professor Alison Ritter
'The dynamics of drug policy: Relational, emergent and contingent'

The traditional view of policy, as epitomised in the technical-rational policy cycle, has now been superseded. Policy is now understood as a complex, dynamic, multi-determined set of processes. With reference to case examples such as recovery as the new political capital for drug policy; drug law enforcement; and treatment purchasing models, in this paper I will outline the ways in which policy processes are highly relational, and socially constructed. The ways in which policy constitutes the problems, and how solutions actively shape objects and subjects, can be observed. As an emergent phenomenon, policy can be understood as determined by the dynamic and evolving interplay among institutions, actors, and problematisations within a socio-political context subject to change. In this way, policy is not fixed but made in practice. There is something refreshing and optimistic about this view, inasmuch as it suggests possibilities that can arise in the contingent space. It gives hope to new forms of policy making around illicit drugs. However, being able to harness that opportunity is enormously challenging: it requires different actors, capacity to reflect on unspoken and covert assumptions and concepts, and a willingness to jettison or at least suspend causal thinking about the relationships between problems and solutions.

Professor Alison Ritter, BA (Hons), MA(Clin Psych), PhD, is an internationally recognised drug policy scholar and the Director of the Drug Policy Modelling Program (DPMP) at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) at the University of New South Wales. She is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow leading a multi-disciplinary program of research on drug policy. The goal of the work is to advance drug policy through improving the evidence-base, translating research and studying policy processes. Professor Ritter worked as a clinical psychologist in the alcohol and drug treatment sector prior to commencing full-time research. She has contributed significant policy and practice developments in the alcohol and drug sector over many years. She is the President of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, Vice-President of the Alcohol and Drug Council of Australia and an Editor for a number of journals, including Drug and Alcohol Review, and the International Journal of Drug Policy. Professor Ritter has an extensive research grant track record and has published widely in the field.