Alcohol, Poverty and the City - CFP AAG New York, 23-28 Feb, 2012.

Session Organisers:  Clare Herrick (KCL), Sue Parnell (UCT) and Mary Lawhon (UCT)

Session abstract:

The study of drink, drinking and drinkers has long been a concern of social scientists who have variously interrogated the historical context of drinking “problems”, the changing dynamics of the night-time economy, policy, public health, ascriptions of morality, addiction, social disorder, violence and crime. In more recent years, geographical approaches to alcohol have started to ask questions of the role of space and place in defining and shaping drinking practices and outcomes. However, such work has overwhelmingly been situated in the Global North. 

In 2010, all member states of the WHO ratified the Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol. In so doing, they signaled a profound shift in alcohol’s conceptualization as a problem and, furthermore, the geographical delineations of risk and risk-taking. In short, the Global Strategy demonstrates that drinking can no longer simply be understood as a problem of excess or irresponsibility in North America or Europe, but rather a more complex amalgam of consumption behaviours and processes that are rooted in inequalities and have profound developmental dynamics.  In transposing alcohol and other behavioural risks onto the terrain of poverty and development, the Strategy also opens up the possibility of rethinking how we, as social scientists, conceptualize drink, drinkers and drinking themselves. In so doing, it also lays bare the dearth of research exploring the dynamics of drinking in poor places, in both the Global North and South. This is especially true in urban locales where political economic drivers clash with definitive sets of vulnerabilities embedded in city environments.

This session therefore seeks to interrogate the multitudinous ways in which alcohol (as material good, risky behaviour or pleasurable activity) intersects with poverty and development. While the Global Strategy primarily situates drinking as a health issue, this session aims to go beyond this to question the broader ways in which drink, drinking and drinkers are situated and situate themselves in poor spaces in cities of both the Global North and South. The session conveners therefore welcome papers on a wide range of empirical and conceptual approaches that go, in a sense, ‘beyond alcohol’, and might include (but are not limited to): 

·         Studies of lived experience

·         Political ecology

·         The role of institutions and urban regulation

·         Historical accounts

·         The role of violence

·         The significance of/for homelessness

·         The significance of/ for worklessness

·         The role of gender relations

·         The role of economic factors.

·         Health agendas

·         Discourses of personal responsibility, choice etc

·         Environmental determinants of behaviour and risk

Please send abstracts to Clare Herrick ([log in to unmask], Sue Parnell ([log in to unmask]) and Mary Lawhon ([log in to unmask]) by August 31st, 2011.

-- 
Dr Clare Herrick 
Lecturer in Human Geography
Department of Geography
King's College London
Strand WC2R 2LS
UK

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New Book: Governing Health and Consumption: Sensible Citizens, Behaviour and the City. 
http://www.policypress.co.uk/results.asp?sf1=contributor&st1=Clare%20w/2%20Herrick&


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