NDRI book gives answers on addiction

NDRI academics Suzanne Fraser and David Moore, together with Helen Keane of the Australian National University, have published a new book, Habits: Remaking Addiction. The book seeks to answer some of the many questions around addiction:

  • What is ‘addiction’?
  • What does it say about us, our social arrangements and our political preoccupations?
  • How are ideas about, and responses to, addiction changing, and what is at stake in these developments?

The book traces three burgeoning areas of addiction attribution and concern: the much feared ‘meth’ crisis, new concerns over youth ‘binge drinking’, and the rise of ‘food addiction’ and the ‘obesity epidemic’. How is addiction being remade in new debates about stimulant drugs, alcohol, and ‘highly palatable’ foods such as sugar? How might the primary source of accepted wisdom on drugs – scientific knowledge – contribute to these definitions? Are there points at which the sciences (and the public discourses that rely on them) trip over their own blindspots or repeat unexamined assumptions, inadvertently undoing their own certainties about drugs and addiction? As this book finds, addiction is a habit in more ways than one. 

View a sample of the book on Amazon.

Download an order form for the book.


Posted on: 1 Jul 2014

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