Kylie Valentine

Citizenship, Identity, Blood Donation

Blood donation is broadly understood to be a public and altruistic act. However, new theories of citizenship and subjectivity suggest that the individual and embodied qualities of blood also need to be taken into account when examining donation. This article examines the relationship between public and private elements of blood donation. Donating blood is not an entirely public act, and does not provide an entirely impersonal resource. The embodied self is integral to public practices, and, equally, public domains are important to the constitution of private spaces. However, this study shows that recognition of the individuality of blood is often cast in moral terms. The exclusion of already marginalized people from donating blood presents a risk of further marginalization. If blood donation is understood to be a civic practice open to everyone, then it becomes too easy to see those who cannot donate as non-citizens. New vocabularies of difference are needed. It is an ongoing necessity that altruistic donors are valued; it is also important that those who cannot donate are not punished by this process of valuing.

Valuing methadone takeaway doses: The contribution of service-user perspectives to policy and practice

Unlike health policy in the United Kingdom, Australian health policy does not provide a strong endorsement for the involvement of service users in the design, delivery and evaluation of drug treatment services. There has been no research into service-users’ views on the contentious issue of methadone takeaway doses. This study explores the value of takeaway doses from service-users’ perspectives and highlights the contributions that service-user involvement can make to further drug treatment planning, delivery and evaluation. Twenty-five methadone clients were interviewed about the value of methadone takeaway doses. Benefits cited by participants included convenience, less travel and lower costs, protection of confidentiality and less restriction on employment as well as less tangible issues related to feelings of ‘normality’ and flexibility in daily life patterns. Feeling trusted as a methadone client was also an important result of accessing takeaway doses. The inclusion of service-user perspectives is important for ensuring that services are not wrongly targeted and that evaluations of those services do not underestimate or misrepresent their value to clients. This is particularly important in policy around illicit drug use where public and political opinion is often a key driver in decision making.

Methadone Maintenance Treatment and Making Up People

This ar ticle considers the operations of methadone maintenance treatment through the use of concepts proposed by actor-network theor y and historical ontology. The former provokes a concern with the co-constitution of treatment regimes by various actors, including non-human actants.The latter provokes a concern with the creation of new identities. Analysis of methadone often examines treatment as a nether world, and clients as neither addicted nor autonomous.The analysis under taken here instead emphasizes what is produced in methadone maintenance treatment, rather than the inexactness of existing categories. It considers four identities produced through methadone treatment: the dissatisfied customer ; the stable user ; the individual in need of guidance; and the lay carer. This analysis enables a study of what and who is produced through treatment in terms that problematize simple distinctions between good and bad, addicted and independent, stable and chaotic.

Making Blood Flow: Materializing Blood in Body Modification and Blood-borne Virus Prevention

This article combines in-depth interviews and Karen Barads work on materiality to think about the ways in which the materiality of blood might be understood in relation to sociality and blood-borne virus prevention among BDSM (bondage and domination, dominance and submission and sadomasochism) body modification practitioners in Sydney, Australia. In doing so, it confronts questions of how the materiality of blood can be theorized in ways that neither presume a fixed, a priori ontological status or essence, nor exclude it from an active role in the production of realities. In taking account of both its co-constitutive role in practice, and its figurative power (as flow) in understanding the mind/body, discourse/materiality conjunctions at work in BDSM body modification practice, we aim to illuminate further the imbrication of materiality and meaning, and generate a more complex and fruitful account of blood for the purposes of blood-borne virus prevention and education.

Emergent publics of alcohol and other drug policymaking

ABSTRACT Alcohol and other drug (AOD) policy is developed within complex networks of social, economic, and political forces. One of the key ideas informing this development is that of the ‘public’ of AOD problems and policy solutions. To date, however, little scholarly attention has been paid to notions of the public in AOD policymaking. Precisely how are publics articulated by those tasked with policy development and implementation? In this article, we explore this question in detail. We analyze 60 qualitative interviews with Australian and Canadian AOD policymakers and service providers, arguing that publics figure in these interviews as pre-existing groups that must be managed – contained or educated – to allow policy to proceed. Drawing on Michael Warner’s work, we argue that publics should be understood instead as made in policy processes rather than as preceding them, and we conclude by reframing publics as emergent collectivities of interest. In closing, we briefly scrutinize the widely accepted model of good policy development, that of ‘consultation,’ arguing that, if publics are to be understood as emergent, and therefore policy’s opportunities as more open than is often suggested, a different figure – here that of ‘conference’ is tentatively suggested – may be required.

Examining structural violence in opioid pharmacotherapy treatment in Australia: Sweating the “small stuff” in a liberal paradise

A journal editor recently commented to us that analyses of tructural obstacles to the delivery of harm reduction programs n Australia was “fairly small stuff” at the “relatively easy end f things” in comparison to the gross abuses of human rights xperienced in other countries. While it is undoubtedly true that ustralians who use drugs are not summarily executed, imprisned in enforced labour camps or subject to torture, we argue that t remains imperative to analyse the structural barriers to harm eduction and opioid pharmacotherapy treatment (OPT) that perist, even in what some consider the relatively liberal paradise of ustralia. Australia boasts very low rates of HIV among people who inject rugs (PWID) (Iversen & Maher, 2012), OPT is publicly subsidised nd the National Drug Strategy recognises harm reduction as one f the three pillars of harm minimisation (along with supply and emand reduction) (Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy, 2011). eedle and Syringe Programs are legal and run by and as health ervices. Drug user organisations are funded by government and safer injecting facility has been established, protected and now nabled by law. With such seemingly strong mechanisms to promote the health nd protect the rights of PWID and those who receive OPT, the ournal editor noted above could be correct in suggesting that here is little benefit in examining the structural barriers govering the provision of OPT in Australia. By implication, such analysis ould be considered as illegitimate when considered against the ross violations and violence against PWID in other countries. here is a limited truth to this (brutal) logic. Violence (of varying inds) against PWID is often illegal, but invariably unacceptable and mmoral (Barrett, Lines, Schleifer, Elliott, & Bewley-Taylor, 2008; allahue & Lines, 2010; Lines, Barrett, & Gallahue, 2010; Wolfe & ohen, 2010). And it is to this last point of morality, that we turn o argue that analysis in Australia, and other countries with similar rotections, is crucial. It is in these states that the structural roots f transgressions against the provision of OPT and the rights of its lients may run so close to Western social and culture mores as to e invisible and hence unrecognised and perpetuated. In our privileged position as researchers, policy advocates and olleagues of people who use OPT, we regularly witness instances here the structural regulation of OPT has brought possible or ctual harm to the lives of people who have been legally prescribed his medication. We have a large catalogue of examples to draw rom and mention a few here. Some are startling, some are munane and some make us ashamed that we cannot do better as a rosperous country. However, to ensure that we too do not become lind to the impact of structural factors on OPT, we emphasise

Information provision to grandparent kinship carers: responding to their unique needs

Abstract Grandparent kinship care is a growing policy concern in Australia. Availability of appropriate, timely, and up-to-date information on payments and allowances, support services, and childrens needs, is an important factor in determining whether grandparent carers, and the children in their care, receive the support they need. While it is known that custodial grandparents in Australia have trouble gaining access to information and support, relatively little attention has been paid to the causes of this difficulty. Drawing from interviews with 55 service providers and policy makers from New South Wales, South Australia, and the Northern Territory, this article identifies two salient issues: the characteristics of this group, which results in special communication and information needs; and the difficulties grandparent-headed families face due to their unique relationship to the state.

Social inclusion and hepatitis C: exploring new possibilities for prevention.

In Western countries, people who inject drugs experience a disproportionate burden of hepatitis C as a result of effective transmission of the virus via the sharing of used injection equipment. With a hepatitis C prevalence of 60% and higher in many areas, previous and current prevention efforts focusing on the availability of sterile injecting equipment along with education, have had only limited effect on incidence rate. Little attention has been paid to the broader social and political positions that drug use and people who use drugs hold in these societies. Insights from social research provide opportunities to broaden the possibilities for prevention efforts. We will review the social inclusion literature to provide some examples of how hepatitis C prevention may be approached in innovative ways.

Complex Needs and Wicked Problems: How Social Disadvantage Became Multiple

This article traces changes in the descriptions of entrenched social disadvantage, and changes in the way that social description is conceptualised and measured. The article is also an analysis of the importance of categories and categorisation to social policy research; an importance which is recognised relatively rarely. Its focus is on the growing importance of multiplicity as a mode for measuring and conceptualising disadvantage. It argues that multiplicity has become important in social policy, and traces distinct trends in research and policy over the last half-century, and their convergence at particular moments. The rise of multiplicity as a trope for understanding social disadvantage has the effect of rendering social problems as more ‘wicked’ and intractable than they were previously understood to be. The strengths of this are in the sophistication of theoretical, multidisciplinary conceptualisations of disadvantage and the disadvantaged. There may be costs to this, however, in policy responses to addressing peoples needs.

Responses to family and domestic violence: supporting women?

ABSTRACT At a time when domestic and family violence (DFV) is being cast as a national emergency, comparable to terrorism, it is timely to review the relationship between feminist advocacy and state-led responses. The principles of long-standing feminist interventions into DFV, which privilege victims’ accounts of their experience, are at risk of being sidelined in the contemporary emphasis on evidence-based policy and atheoretical approaches. However, promising signs are evident in interventions that support women’s economic security, safe and permanent housing, and employment. These interventions are constituted by specific, local networks of actors including government and non-government organisations. The effects of DFV can be distributed across multiple domains, including workplaces, housing, and courts. These diverse effects may best suit an integrated, multi-systemic response, which is based on recognition of the importance of empowerment, agency, and meeting practical needs.