After the workshop, participants are invited to attend the exhibition Behind Closed Doors: Recreational drug storage strategies under prohibitionist drug policies followed by a reception at the 4th-floor A-B Lounge (Please register)
Let’s Get Creative! Using creative methods in research and public engagement
About the workshop:
Creative research methods have developed and multiplied in recent decades, providing social scientists with alternative ways of knowing and understanding the world. They help us answer complex research questions that cannot be achieved by traditional methods alone and engage different audiences with the results of research. In this interactive workshop, Dr Lisa Williams outlines how researchers are being creative with traditional approaches to research and analysis, as well as using arts-based and visual research methods to gather data and report their findings. She discusses the methods employed in her arts-based project, Behind Closed Doors: Recreational drug storage strategies under prohibitionist drug policies, in which she took photographs of how and where people store their recreational drugs in the home. She argues that creative and arts-based methods provide a more nuanced understanding of complicated phenomenon, improve public engagement and understanding, and can achieve wider impact. The workshop aims to inspire attendees to use creative approaches to collect, analyse and present their data.
About the exhibition:
In many countries, the possession of drugs is illegal with severe criminal sanctions. Yet, one in 17 people worldwide took a drug in the past 12 months in 2021, a 23 per cent increase compared to a decade earlier (UNODC, 2023). Rates of use are higher among young people and specific groups in society. This exhibition demonstrates how recreational drug takers respond to prohibitionist drug policies in the UK through the strategies they use for storing drugs in the home.
The data have been collected as part of a research project with 10 people, most living in Greater Manchester, aged between 28 and 58. The images illustrate the range of substances and paraphernalia kept at home, and how they are stored in a variety of locations and containers. The interview extracts provide some explanations for this and pose questions regarding the unintended consequences of punitive drug policy approaches. Drugs were often stashed alongside everyday objects demonstrating the normalization of recreational drug use in contemporary society. Participants who were parents discussed how they purposefully stored their drugs out of reach or out of sight of their children. Few discussed how their drug storage strategy was devised to avoid detection by authorities. Ultimately, the research evidences the impacts of public policies on everyday private lives.
About the speaker:
Lisa Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, at the Department of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester. She has been researching drugs for over 25 years. Her interests revolve around: recreational drug taking, including why people take drugs and how their drug taking changes over the life course; dependent drug use, recently publishing about synthetic cannabinoids consumption among vulnerable populations; and creative research methods, especially arts-based and visual techniques. Since 1999, she has been working on the Illegal Leisure longitudinal study exploring changing drug patterns from adolescence to adulthood. The findings have been published in Illegal Leisure Revisited and Changing Lives, Changing Drug Journeys. Her most recent research, a visual ethnography of recreational drug taking in the home, collected images of where and how people store their recreational drugs in the home and has been exhibited nationally and internationally.