Angus Bancroft

Young people, biographical narratives and the life grid: young people’s accounts of parental substance use

Research into potentially sensitive issues with young people presents numerous methodological and ethical challenges. While recent studies have highlighted the advantages of task-based activities in research with young people, the literature on life history research provides few suggestions as to effective and appropriate research tools for encouraging young people to tell their stories. This article explores the contribution that may be made to such research by the life grid, a visual tool for mapping important life events against the passage of time and prompting wide-ranging discussion. Critical advantages of the life grid in qualitative research include: its visual element, which can help to engage interviewer and interviewee in a process of constructing and reflecting on a concrete life history record; its role in creating a more relaxed research encounter supportive of the respondent’s ‘voice’; and facilitating the discussion of sensitive issues. In addition, the way in which use of the grid anchors such narratives in accounts of everyday life, often revealing interesting tensions, is explored. These points are discussed with reference to an exploratory study of young people’s experience of parental substance use.

The consequences of love: young people and family practices in difficult circumstances

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of sociological work exploring the importance and meaning of kinship. Much of this work has criticized the ‘individualization’ thesis according to which changes in family structures over time have been interpreted as reflecting a fundamental decline in family values. Highlighting continuities as well as change in family life, this work has also suggested ways to move beyond the individualization debate and to develop alternative frameworks for the study of contemporary families and personal life, notably through the analysis of related practices. For various reasons, this recent work has focused primarily on the experience and practices of adults in ‘ordinary’ rather than more difficult family circumstances. This article aims to complement this work by focusing on the difficult family experiences of young people affected by parental substance use. It is argued that it is important not to lose sight of such experiences in order that sociological thinking reflect the diversity of family practices and the resources available to support them, including at younger ages. In addition, the importance of developing concepts or a language facilitating the exploration and communication of the emotional and symbolic significance of these practices is emphasized.

Drinking with and Without Fun: Female Students' Accounts of Pre-Drinking and Club-Drinking

Pre-drinking, also known as pre-partying, pre-gaming, and front- or pre-loading, is the intensive pair or group consumption of alcohol in a private home prior to going out for the night, with the intention of ensuring maximum levels of intoxication. It has emerged as a distinct component of heavy drinking practice among young adults approximately between the ages of 18-25. This paper examines reflective accounts of female students’ pre-drinking and club-drinking. It explores the experience of pre-drinking in the context of the overall drinking sequence undertaken throughout the evening in and the night out. It finds that pre-drinking has a specific purpose for young women in managing risk, as well as ensuring a shared level of intoxication in preparation for entry into public drinking spaces. Their accounts illustrate the performative nature of intoxication. Pre-drinking is highly directed, bounded, and ritualised. It was frequently, though not always, recounted as lacking in pleasure for these reasons. It was associated with preparation for entry to a particular kind of superpub or nightclub especially, where the emphasis was on further rapid alcohol consumption. Accounts of continued drinking in the nightclubs were dualistic, emphasising pleasure and disgust, along with risk and vulnerability. Risk was experienced as individualised, and the women had shared responsibility for guarding against risk from unsafe others in the nightclub environment. This coding of risk is supported by public health messages targeted at women drinkers and by the more general societal and drinks industry promoted representation of alcohol consumption as normal and abstinence as deviant, which students were critical of. One attraction of pre-drinking for female students was as a way of protecting and supporting female agency in conditions of generalised, individualised vulnerability.

Globalisation and HIV / AIDS: inequality and the boundaries of a symbolic epidemic.

The impact of HIV/AIDS is closely intertwined with imbalances of power and access to resources among different groups of people in different parts of the world. This paper seeks to interpret HIV/AIDS in the context of globalisation. It takes as its starting point the scientific controversy over the origins of HIV/AIDS in the human population. It examines the relationship between the virus, signification, social exclusion and inequality. Gender differences and issues of identity are considered. Theoretical considerations are made regarding modernity and post-modernity and the changed role of the nation-state. It is argued that global and local inequalities are reproduced in the context of the disease. These inequalities can be understood in terms of both the material processes characteristic of modernity and the struggles over boundaries and borders that have been a defining feature of post-modernity.

'Gypsies to the Camps!': Exclusion and Marginalisation of Roma in the Czech Republic

Under Communism the Roma minority in the Czech Republic were subject to severe state directed assimilation policies. Since the end of the Cold War they have endured a combination of labour market exclusion and racially motivated violence. The apparent historical discontinuity between the Communists’ strategies of assimilation and the current forms of exclusion and marginalisation is often explained by pointing to the social and economic upheaval caused by the transition to capitalism, or the resurgence of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’. When examining anti-Roma racism (or other examples of ethnic conflict) in the former Communist countries of Europe, commentators tend to regard it as signifying the backwardness of these nations. These perspectives ignore racisms modern aspect. In contrast this paper seeks to highlight some of the continuities between the situation of Roma today and their historical position. It uses Simmels concept of ‘the Stranger’ as applied by Bauman to understand the ambivalent place of Roma in European modernity, at times subject to coercive assimilation, at other times on the receiving end of racial violence. It challenges narratives which attempt to Orientalise racism as the preserve of ‘uncivilised and backward’ nations or a white underclass. It seeks to put racism in its place as a part of European modernity and its deployment of assimilative or exclusionary strategies against ‘Stranger’ minorities.

Challenging the techno-politics of anonymity: the case of cryptomarket users

ABSTRACT Anonymity is treated as a problem of governance that can be subject to technical resolution. We use the example of the darknet to critically examine this approach. We explore the background assumptions that have been made about anonymity as a quality of social life. We conceive of anonymity as a way of engaging and maintaining social relationships in an anonymous mode. We draw on a study of darknet ‘cryptomarket’ users who mainly use the darknet to buy and sell illicit drugs, discuss drug quality and share information on safe and effective use. We identify the personal satisfaction that comes from interacting anonymously online, the challenges this represents for maintaining trusted interactions and how they are overcome, and the combination of technology and action involved in maintaining anonymity. We argue that attempts to promote de-anonymising norms and technology are based on an erroneous understanding of what anonymity is.

Working at Pleasure in Young Women's Alcohol Consumption: A Participatory Visual Ethnography

This paper reports on a participatory ethnography conducted with undergraduate students. It examined the rituals and habits through which they constructed their intoxication culture. Students used video recording devices such as smartphones to collect data about aspects of their intoxication experiences. They were then interviewed about emerging analytical themes. In this paper we focus on one aspect of intoxication culture, the place of pleasure in womens accounts. We build on previous research that showed that pleasure was present but not always dominant in womens accounts of leisure focused drinking. They experienced the predominant, neo-liberal concept of pleasure as a demand which had to be navigated alongside their own desires which could include a preference for a more situated, intimate, sociability. Pre-drinking occasions were especially significant as places where bonds could be built up and body and self prepared to enter the public night-time economy. For many, this preparation became the main, enjoyable event in contrast to sometimes fraught and demanding public drinking spaces, where women could find themselves subject to various critical judgements about their femininity. Their activities on these occasions focused on achieving a ‘good drunk’, a manageable state of group intoxication. We use these findings to comment critically on the gendering of the night-time economy, the narrow framing of ‘pleasure’ in it, and the commodification of student experience in the UK.

Not Being There: Research at a Distance with Video, Text and Speech

Abstract This chapter examines the history and process of research participants producing and working with data. The experience of working with researcher-produced and/or analysed data shows how social research is a set of practices which can be shared with research participants, and which in key ways draw on everyday habits and performances. Participant-produced data has come to the fore with the popularity of crowdsourced, citizen science research and Games with a Purpose. These address practical problems and potentially open up the research process to large scale democratic involvement. However at the same time the process can become fragmented and proletarianised. Mass research has a long history, an exemplar of which is the Mass Observation studies. Our research involved participants collecting video data on their intoxication practices. We discuss how their experience altered their own subject position in relation to these regular social activities, and explore how our understanding of their data collection converged and differed from theirs. Crowdsourced research raises a challenge to the research binary as the work is done by participants rather than the research team; however it also reaffirms it, unless further work is done to involve participants in commenting and reflecting on the research process itself.

Responsible use to responsible harm: illicit drug use and peer harm reduction in a darknet cryptomarket

Sale of illicit drugs through online ‘cryptomarkets’ is a notable innovation in the illicit drug market. Cryptomarkets present new ways of configuring risk and harm in relation to drug use. I examine the kinds of knowledge and discourses users employed to do this. I argue that the lay/expert divide that creates a hierarchy of knowledge around drug use and harms is increasingly undermined by the creation of knowledge communities by drug users who make drug use work effectively for them. I draw on the discussion forum of a now defunct English language focused cryptomarket, anonymised as ‘Merkat’, collected between 2015 and 2016. Typically, vendors in the major cryptomarkets are based in the USA, UK, China, the Netherlands and Australia. Buyers were mainly located in the USA, UK, Australia and Western Europe. I scraped the market forum threads and coded on emergent themes. I found that risk worked along four axes, cultural normalisation/pathologisation, chemical potency, legal/policy and market, each of which required a set of practices and orientations to manage successfully. Users indicated that they had adapted many harm reduction practices, while also promoting a ‘responsible harm’ orientation where they sought to own and take charge of harm. The support infrastructure drew on knowledge from drug users, vendors and interested professionals. I conclude that cryptomarkets can provide a community infrastructure that supports the exchange of drugs and configures them as risky but manageable objects.

Women, Families & HIV/AIDS: A Sociological Perspective on the Epidemic in America

hasn’t received much public attention. Edelstein and Makofske reject it rather quickly. But even if one accepts the lowest reputable estimates of radon risk, it is still far more hazardous than many heavily regulated environmental threats, including other radiation risks. Whether you think radon is underregulated or toxic waste dumps and nuclear power plants are overregulated (or you see justification for a less straightforward relationship between health risk and regulatory response), surely such gaps are worth trying to account for. Most of Radon’s Deadly Daughters is devoted to exploding a series of ‘myths’ that Edelstein and Makofske believe underlie the government’s inadequate radon response. Most important is ‘the myth of the market solution’, the privatization of the radon burden that Edelstein and Makofske link persuasively to Reaganomics. (I remember arguing that radon was the ideal environmental issue for a Republican administration. I never considered that a different administration might have framed the issue differently.) Closely related is ‘the myth of decentralization’ that radon response should be at a state and local rather than at a federal level, which Edelstein and Makofske also link to Reaganomics. Among the book’s other myths: