Recovery as a minor practice (2022)

This article investigates the methodological potential of interdisciplinary research to generate collective rather than interpretive or reflective knowledge practices for the study of recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. The question that informs this investigation of knowledge practices is how researchers participate in knowledge production and the possibility of building alternative interdisciplinary methods that connect experts to treatment services and service-users in new ways. In the first part, we trace and evaluate methodological debates on research methods in academic, professional and treatment service settings. In so doing we consider the role sociologists have played in engaging qualitative, quantitative and deconstructive methods for researching recovery from addiction, and the strengths and limitations of empirical and critical research methodologies in responding to drug policy on recovery. In the second part of the article, describing a research collaboration with the sociologists Nicole Vitellone and Lena Theodoropoulou, the visual artist and filmmaker Melanie Manchot, and research participants' from creative recovery services in Liverpool, we outline the possibilities offered by the concept of recovery as a minor practice to reconfigure the role of experts, methods, and participants in new collaborative lines of inquiry. Turning to observations of a set of cinema-based pilot workshops from 2019 and 2020 with people in recovery, we describe the effects and consequences of an interdisciplinary methodology for enabling a different way of thinking about recovery as a minor practice. In rethinking and reimagining recovery as a minor practice, the article provides a distinctive interdisciplinary approach for recovery-oriented practice and policy.