Description
This dissertation explores the historical development and contemporary deployment of discursive practices that constitute the “truth” of addiction, which in turn serve as the bases for interventions into the lives of people who use intoxicants for any number of reasons. A number of interrelated research questions structure this governmentality analysis. First, what is the evolution of the governmental frames developed and deployed to understand, discipline, and recover addiction in the arena of alcohol and illicit drug use in United States? Second, how does twelve-step serve to transform unruly addicts into self-disciplining citizens? Finally, how does The Meth Project (TMP) exemplify and/or diverge from the dominant addiction governmental frames developed during the Temperance and Progressive eras in the United States? My overall goal is to destabilize our ready understanding of addiction and demonstrate that it is as much a tool of social needs as it is a mental illness by demonstrating: 1) the historically contingent nature of our understandings of addiction and addicts; 2) how these historically contingent understandings are actualized as technologies geared toward “recovering” unruly subjects; and 3) how these historically contingent understandings are taken up as “epistemological scripts” used to conceptualize the “true nature” of certain types of drugs and drug users while simultaneously supporting various regimes of discipline and punishment for those determined to remain “unruly subjects.”
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Details
Title
- Recovering addiction: a critique of intoxicant governance in the United States
Contributors
- Walker, Michael F (Author)
- Nadesan, Majia H (Thesis advisor)
- Provine, Doris M (Thesis advisor)
- Cavender, Gray (Committee member)
- Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2016
Subjects
Resource Type
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Note
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thesisPartial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2016
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bibliographyIncludes bibliographical references (pages 158-173)
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Field of study: Justice studies
Citation and reuse
Statement of Responsibility
by Michael F. Walker