Becoming with Care in Drug Treatment Services: The Recovery Assemblage

By: Lena Theodoropoulou

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Synopsis: Employing Deleuzo-Guattarian orientations to assemblage and feminist approaches to care, this book offers a critique of neoliberal approaches to recovery from drugs and alcohol, while collapsing the dualities of harm reduction and recovery. This monograph empirically explores the practices of care emerging in two drug recovery services in Liverpool and Athens. Following the flows of the participants’ desires, it argues that it is not the lack of the substance that holds the recovery assemblage together, but the production of connections that enhance a body’s power of acting, constituting recovery a practice of collective care. The outcome of the analysis of the lived experiences of people in recovery is a call for the dismissal of policy as an intervention coming from outside, and its reconstitution as a practice produced inside the recovery assemblage. Focusing on the value of the assemblage as a viable methodological, ontological and epistemological orientation for critical drug studies, this volume contributes to the sociology of health and illness, and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Deleuzian Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology and Social Policy, Drugs and Addiction, Public Health and Medical Anthropology.