Abstract
This article describes a process of creating an ethnographic comic about injection drug use and hepatitis C, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Norway. The project and the graphic publication titled The Virus were a collaboration between a social anthropologist, a graphic artist, and individuals who inject illegal drugs and are aimed at reducing bodily, social, and narrative harms related to drug use. The article argues that structurally informed interventions, such as this project, which account for the social, economic, and epistemological inequalities, benefit from taking phenomenological perspectives seriously. In our case, that attitude meant including participants’ positive associations with their current or former heroin and injecting drug usage, their stigmatized desires, and their emotions—such as love—related to the disease. The article describes the narrative, conceptual, aesthetic, and practical choices encountered in making The Virus to confront the dominant, authorized narratives in the field of drug use and hepatitis C. We sought to make choices that ultimately would not contribute to the (re)production of the very object of the prevention—stigma related to hepatitis C—but instead would create a new narrative(s) that forged a sense of purpose, recognition, and humanity.
Highlights
This article describes a process of creating an ethnographic comic about injection drug use and hepatitis C, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Norway
hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is rarely mentioned as a risk connected to injecting drugs, even though HIV infection is widely communicated as such a risk, and that both are often co-occurring (Bartoszko & Ponomarew, 2016)
The focus in Norway on harm reduction related to injecting drugs and HCV has increased, including the creation of a national hepatitis C strategy and free treatment for all persons infected with HCV, including persons who use drugs (Helse-og omsorgsdepartementet, 2018)
Summary
This article describes a process of creating an ethnographic comic about injection drug use and hepatitis C, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Norway. Effective communication includes respect for often discounted ways of living, which by extension forges another narrative about the reality of people injecting drugs than the one that dominates public health discourse (see, e.g., Malins, 2009).
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