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Posted Wed, 28 Mar 2018 09:36:58
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We are delighted to announce the next BSA Medsoc South Coast regional group symposium:
Doing research with people who inject drugs: critical perspectives on ethics, drug effects and harm reduction.
Guest speakers: Roberto Abadie (Nebraska-Lincoln) and Fay Dennis (Goldsmiths)
Friday 13th April 2018, 1-3pm. Moot Room, Freeman Building, University of Sussex. All welcome!
Abstracts
Speaker 1: 'Money helps': Research participants' views on financial compensation and its ethical implications.
Roberto Abadie (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
While payment to research subjects is a longstanding practice, it continues to elicit ethical debates. Payment increases recruitment, enhancing scientific validity and contributing to the production of valuable scientific knowledge. Yet, critics argue that financial inducements might unduly coerce research participants, particularly in the case of vulnerable research populations. Despite an over production of ethically inspired frameworks to approach this issue, there is a lack of empirical data regarding participants' views regarding financial compensation. This paper aims to document how People Who Inject Drugs (PWID) perceive and understand research payments within the context of HIV epidemiological studies, and to develop recommendations to inform best research ethics practices. One of the strengths of this study is that participants' responses are rooted in their previous experience in a community health study which offer financial compensation. Research was conducted among a sub set N=40 active PWID > 18 years of age, living in towns within rural Puerto Rico who had been previously enrolled in a much larger study involving N=360 participants. Findings suggest that financial compensation was among the main motivations participants had to initially consider enrolling in the study. Since most participants live in poverty and one in three were currently homeless at the time of the study, financial compensation was not only perceived as an unmitigated good, but also as part of an exchange where participants contributed with their time and disposition to engage in the study, while in turn, researchers reciprocated by financially assisting them.
Speaker 2: Contingent drug effects and situated harms.
Dr Fay Dennis (Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Taking my lead from the entangled drug-body-worlds I have encountered in my research with people who inject drugs (predominantly heroin and crack cocaine) over the last 10 years in the UK, I will reflect on an approach to drug effects based on these socio-material processes and an endeavour to reduce harm based on the drug-using ‘event’ (Dennis, 2017). For a long time, social scientists have recognised the social constitution of drug harms: drugs do not act alone but their effects are informed by the social, political and economic environment in which they are consumed. Drawing on recent turns to the ‘new material’ in critical drug studies, this ‘risk environment’ is pushed yet further. In my doctoral research, ‘drug effects’ were not only informed by these structures but constituted within assemblages of both social and material bodies and forces, produced through the ‘injecting event’. These ‘effects’, I argue, include the very drugs, bodies and environments that are said to precede them and each other. Through these entanglements, participants talked about the drug becoming ‘a different drug altogether’, the body becoming something ‘other’ or ‘normal’, and the ‘environment’, socially (e.g. discourses, policy) and materially (e.g. ‘paraphernalia’), as more than informative or facilitative but co-constitutive of the effect. Therefore, rather than focusing on the drug, body or environment, or ‘drug, set and setting’, as Zinberg (1984) once famously put it, reducing harm must be situated at the level of the event.
Dr Catherine Will, School of Law, Politics and Sociology, Freeman Building G44, University of Sussex, BN1 9QE. Tel: 01273 678449. [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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