Abstract
This article mobilises Heather Love’s writings on description to provide a novel analysis of recovery from drugs and alcohol. It discusses thin descriptions deriving from the presence of the researcher in the recovery space, and the service-users’ thick descriptions of their recovery experiences, produced through one-to-one interviews and photovoice. Thin and thick descriptions of recovery are brought together with the Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage, for the provision of an insight into the practice of recovery that focuses on its daily crafting through small practices of care. Observing and describing how phone calls and text messages, assessment forms, doorways and art materials inform the generation of caring practices, recovery is reconfigured as an amalgam of small gestures that gradually expand life possibilities. This epistemological and methodological shift has the potential to unsettle the way we understand and do policy, and to re-think it as a practice emerging organically inside the recovery assemblage.
Highlights
In her paper ‘Small Change: Realism, Immanence, and the Politics of the Micro’, Love (2016) challenges the constitution of small-scale observations of everyday life as conservative, and she argues instead for the political utility of description at the micro scale
Thinking with the politics of the micro (Love, 2016) and focusing on the description of small-scale practices of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012) has the potential to shift the way we do and think about policy, as a practice that is not imposed upon subjects, but emerges through the daily crafting of recovery
Through the deployment of photography, we addressed the issue of re-engagement with assemblages that extend beyond the recovery assemblage
Summary
Small-scale practices of care can shift how we understand and do recovery from drugs and alcohol. Critical analyses have often situated recovery within a neoliberal system of thought, exposing a long-standing systemic disinterest in the needs of drug-using bodies (Fraser and valentine, 2008; Nettleton et al, 2013) They have led to the production of a grand narrative, an interpretation of recovery that neglects its site-specific, daily crafting through small-scale, material practices of care. They multiply in every direction; they are fluid, impermanent and complex (Delanda, 2016) Their applications are infinite and choosing to apply the assemblage theory on spaces of recovery entails the commitment to understand the recovery process as a transformative one, that does not produce drug-free subjects but suggests another way of being in the world. Latimer’s call for a shift from heroic to small-scale aspects of healthcare is enacted in this paper through an empirical and methodological shift from an interest in the recovered subject (Fomiatti et al, 2019), to care for the recovering subject and the description of the recovery process as an assemblage that expands life possibilities
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