Drug Addiction-to-Recovery Trajectories in British Sociocultural and Political Contexts: A Synthetic Discursive Exploration
type: CreativeWork
description: User of certain illegal drugs are arguably the most stigmatised group in British society. Moreover, people who are known to have a history of drug dependence are rarely given the opportunity to talk about their lives (Tutengs et al., 2015) much less be listened to by those who are willing and able to convey their narratives to professional and mainstream audiences. Their lack of voice has been produced by the idea that some groups lack the capacity to produce useful knowledge about their lives (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009). This qualitative, discursive study disrupts this normative inclination, exploring how eight former problematic-drug users construct their addiction-to-recovery trajectories in British sociocultural and political contexts. Underpinned by a constructionist epistemology, it starts from the premise that accounts of addiction and recovery cannot be understood in isolation from the contexts with which and in which they are produced. The research has two connected empirical strands. The first strand - a Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis of England’s ‘recovery roadmap’ - draws attention to discourses permeating the text, critically discussing their implications for people with a history of drug addiction. In so doing, it renders visible a salient aspect of the discursive environment. This attention to the discursive milieu feeds into the second strand of the study consisting of qualitative interviews with former drug users, some of whom frame their accounts through the lens of Christian faith and others with no religious inclination. Here a synthetic discursive analytic framework is utilised with people viewed as both produced by and producers of discourse (Billig, 1991). The focus, broadly speaking, is how culturally available discursive resources both shape and are utilised by speakers to construct versions of reality as well as the rhetorical-discursive strategies respondents deploy and for what purpose. Another analytic consideration relates to …
abstract: User of certain illegal drugs are arguably the most stigmatised group in British society. Moreover, people who are known to have a history of drug dependence are rarely given the opportunity to talk about their lives (Tutengs et al., 2015) much less be listened to by those who are willing and able to convey their narratives to professional and mainstream audiences. Their lack of voice has been produced by the idea that some groups lack the capacity to produce useful knowledge about their lives (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009). This qualitative, discursive study disrupts this normative inclination, exploring how eight former problematic-drug users construct their addiction-to-recovery trajectories in British sociocultural and political contexts. Underpinned by a constructionist epistemology, it starts from the premise that accounts of addiction and recovery cannot be understood in isolation from the contexts with which and in which they are produced. The research has two connected empirical strands. The first strand - a Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis of England’s ‘recovery roadmap’ - draws attention to discourses permeating the text, critically discussing their implications for people with a history of drug addiction. In so doing, it renders visible a salient aspect of the discursive environment. This attention to the discursive milieu feeds into the second strand of the study consisting of qualitative interviews with former drug users, some of whom frame their accounts through the lens of Christian faith and others with no religious inclination. Here a synthetic discursive analytic framework is utilised with people viewed as both produced by and producers of discourse (Billig, 1991). The focus, broadly speaking, is how culturally available discursive resources both shape and are utilised by speakers to construct versions of reality as well as the rhetorical-discursive strategies respondents deploy and for what purpose. Another analytic consideration relates to …
author: Jackson, Chris
language: eng
keywords: addiction, recovery, drug, drug policy, discourse analysis, discursive, recovery agenda
date published: 2020-2
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:26:52Z
provider: University of Northampton
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Northampton