De adjungerade professorerna David Moore och Suzanne Fraser från Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Australien kommer att presentera under rubriken: Embracing trouble: new ways of doing, being and knowing. 

13.00-13.45 (Fraser) ‘Staying with the trouble’ in social science research on illicit drug use and other issues
 
Trouble seems to be characteristic of contemporary politics and life. From the environment to the pandemic, crises of political credibility around the world, conflict on social media and the drama of so-called ‘cancel culture’, avoiding or settling trouble seems more unimaginable than ever. Yet trouble is not always negative, especially when posed in verb form. To trouble pre-conceptions, orthodoxies or alienating norms can be productive, exciting and transformative. This is as much the case in research as in any other area of life. Troubling our founding assumptions, our research questions, our theories and methods is the way we move forward, even if it is not always easy or immediately rewarding. In this presentation I will reflect on my own engagements with forms of scholarly trouble in my work on illicit drug use and bloodborne viruses, drawing on the work of Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble (2018) to identify key tools through which we as researchers may ‘embrace trouble’ in useful and productive ways. Thinking through some central propositions articulated by Haraway in her engagement with other scholars, such as the importance of storytelling, the value of grieving, and the uses of response-ability, I will offer a range of examples drawn from my own work in critical drug studies to highlight the promises and pitfalls of trouble.

13.45-14.30 (Moore) Displacing gender: Troubling concepts and methods in research on alcohol and violence

This presentation draws on findings from an international comparative project on the handling of gender in research and policy on alcohol and violence in Australia, Canada and Sweden. In earlier analyses, we argued that published quantitative research on alcohol and violence among young people in all three countries tends to overlook the stark gendering of violence in its analyses and policy recommendations. It does this via a series of ‘gendering practices’, which Carol Bacchi (2017, p.20) defines as the ‘active, ongoing and always incomplete processes’ that produce ‘women’ and ‘men’ as naturalised categories in knowledge-making discourses and practices. The gendering practices we identified include: omitting gender from consideration; overlooking clearly gendered data when making gender-neutral policy recommendations; rendering gender invisible via methodological considerations; displacing men and masculinities via a focus on environmental, geographical and temporal factors; and addressing gender in limited ways. In this presentation, we draw on in-depth interviews with 39 Australian, Canadian and Swedish quantitative researchers (drawn from biostatistics, criminology, econometrics, economics, epidemiology, psychology and public health) who study the often-assumed link between alcohol and violence. Issues explored in the interviews included participants’ disciplinary training; the relationships between gender, alcohol, and violence; understandings of gender and alcohol-related problems among young people; and perceptions of barriers to the realisation of effective policy responses to alcohol and violence. We identify three troubling conceptual and methodological processes that lead to the displacement of men and masculinities in quantitative research on violence: (1) an unsustainable binary in which scientific method is contrasted with ‘values’ or ‘ideology’, (2) misplaced assumptions about causality and (3) a focus on female victims of violence that emphasises culpability or vulnerability. In turn, we seek to trouble these processes by offering recommendations for future research practice in which more direct engagement with gender is central.

Seminariet arrangeras av Mats Ekendahl.