CfP: Cultures of Intoxication: Contextualising Alcohol & Drug Use, Past & Present

Venue: Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland

Dates: 7-8 February 2020

This conference will focus on the cultural meanings and contexts of alcohol and drug use, both past and present. It aims to assess how cultural norms and stereotypes around alcohol and drug use shape policies, practices, treatment and users’ experiences and behaviour. In particular, it seeks to consider how and why those of certain ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexuality and socio-economic background are deemed prone to excess while others are supposedly abstemious.

Papers on the following themes will be considered, although this list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive:

• Defining “drinking culture” and “drug culture”
• Attempts to change drinking/drug cultures
• Ethnic, racial, gendered and socio-economic stereotypes/stigma of alcohol and drug use
• Medical/policy/public perspectives on drug and alcohol use
• Cultures of abstinence or excess
• Hidden cultures, subcultures and countercultures
• Culture-specific marketing and advertising
• Cultural representations of alcohol, drugs and their use (i.e. literature, drama, film)
• Alcohol and drugs tourism

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Geoffrey Hunt, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences - Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University

Dr Deborah Toner, School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a short speaker bio, should be submitted to the conference organiser, Dr Alice Mauger by Friday, 6 December 2019. Panel submissions are also welcome.