Interpellating recovery: The politics of 'identity' in recovery-focused treatment

Much research tends to treat alcohol and other drug 'recovery' as a process of positive identity change and development. In this article, we depart from this dominant approach by examining how the social and material practices of alcohol and other drug treatment are themselves active in the constitution of 'recovery identity'. Using Judith Butler's theorisation of interpellation, we examine the accounts of treatment experiences and practices provided in interviews with people who inject drugs. In contrast to the existing literature, we argue that the 'recovering addict' is a socially produced category rather than a coherent psychological identity. We consider the production of this category in relation to three dynamics identified in the data: (1) the tendency to materialise treatment subjects as both disordered and as 'in control' of these disorders; (2) the production of treatment subjects as enmeshed in suspect social relationships and therefore requiring surveillance as well as social support; and (3) treatment's particular enactment of social context such that it erases stigmatisation and marginalisation and paradoxically performs subjects as entirely individually responsible for relinquishing drug use. These dynamics produce capacities and attributes often ascribed to identity but which are better understood as articulations of epistemological disorder in the state of knowledge about addiction, and its expression in treatment. By way of conclusion, we question the utility of 'recovery identity', conventionally defined, in providing a rationale for treatment

Sameness and difference: Metaphor and politics in the constitution of addiction, social exclusion and gender in Australian and Swedish drug policy

Like any other discourse, drug policy is imagined and articulated through metaphors. In this article, we explore the metaphors and meanings at work in the current national drug policies of Australia and Sweden. Australia's approach to welfare is usually characterised as liberal-welfarist, emphasising individual difference and 'freedom'. Sweden's approach is usually characterised as social-democratic, universalistic and paternalistic, with an emphasis on social rights, equity and sameness. How do these models of citizenship - difference versus sameness - play out in national drug policies? What are the risks and benefits of these models and the claims they allow? In the textual analysis presented here, we focus on metaphors and meanings relating to the themes of addiction, social exclusion and gender. We choose metaphor as our major analytical tool because we think that the risks and benefits of adopting different models of citizenship in drug policy need to be understood to operate at many levels and with a high degree of subtlety and abstraction. In the cases of addiction and social exclusion, a complicated picture emerges. In Australia, drug users are offered two options: sameness (and reintegration into society) or difference (and re-connection). In Sweden, drug users are excluded from society but not because they are fundamentally different from non-users. Because drug users are understood to be suffering from a temporary and curable personal affliction, the goal is to return them to sameness through care and treatment. With respect to gender, although differently expressed in the two national contexts and differently shaped by national imaginaries, both national policies adopt similar approaches: the unequal treatment of women transcends differences in national setting. Accounts of drug policy usually focus on the degree to which drug policy is, or should be, 'evidence-based', or on the complex political negotiations involving diverse stakeholders and interests. We suggest here another, complementary, perspective: that national imaginaries (i.e. culturally specific metaphors, symbols and beliefs, and national ideologies) shape drug policy in subtle but crucial ways

Challenging the addiction/health binary with assemblage thinking: An analysis of consumer accounts

Critical analyses of drug use and 'addiction' have identified a series of binary oppositions between addiction and free will, independence, self-control, responsibility, productivity and autonomy. This critical work has also examined how science, policy and popular discourses frequently characterise addiction as antithetical to health and well-being. Furthermore, those diagnosed with addiction are often understood as indifferent to health and well-being, or as lacking the knowledge or desire required to maintain them. In this article, we draw on data from 60 qualitative interviews with people who self-identify as living with an 'addiction', 'dependence' or 'habit', to argue that the binary opposition between addiction and health struggles to attend to their rich and varied health perspectives and experiences. We explore three themes in the interview data: reinscribing the binary opposition between addiction and health/well-being; strategies for maintaining health and well-being alongside addiction; and alcohol and other drug consumption as aiding health and well-being. Perhaps because addiction and health have been so thoroughly understood as antithetical, such perspectives and experiences have received surprisingly little research and policy attention. Yet they offer fertile ground for rethinking the strengths and capacities of those who self-identity as living with an addiction, dependence or habit, as well as untapped resources for responding to the harm sometimes associated with alcohol and other drug use

Exceptional sperm cooperation in the wood mouse

Spermatozoa from a single male will compete for fertilization of ova with spermatozoa from another male when present in the female reproductive tract at the same time. Close genetic relatedness predisposes individuals towards altruism, and as haploid germ cells of an ejaculate will have genotypic similarity of 50%, it is predicted that spermatozoa may display cooperation and altruism to gain an advantage when inter-male sperm competition is intense. We report here the probable altruistic behaviour of spermatozoa in an eutherian mammal. Spermatozoa of the common wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, displayed a unique morphological transformation resulting in cooperation in distinctive aggregations or 'trains' of hundreds or thousands of cells, which significantly increased sperm progressive motility. Eventual dispersal of sperm trains was associated with most of the spermatozoa undergoing a premature acrosome reaction. Cells undergoing an acrosome reaction in aggregations remote from the egg are altruistic in that they help sperm transport to the egg but compromise their own fertilizing ability

Addiction stigma and the biopolitics of liberal modernity: A qualitative analysis

Definitions of addiction have never been more hotly contested. The advance of neuroscientific accounts has not only placed into public awareness a highly controversial explanatory approach, it has also shed new light on the absence of agreement among the many experts who contest it. Proponents argue that calling addiction a 'brain disease' is important because it is destigmatising. Many critics of the neuroscientific approach also agree on this point. Considered from the point of view of the sociology of health and illness, the idea that labelling something a disease will alleviate stigma is a surprising one. Disease, as demonstrated in that field of research, is routinely stigmatised. In this article we take up the issue of stigma as it plays out in relation to addiction, seeking to clarify and challenge the claims made about the progress associated with disease models. To do so, we draw on Erving Goffman's classic work on stigma, reconsidering it in light of more recent, process oriented, theoretical resources, and posing stigmatisation as a performative biopolitical process. Analysing recently collected interviews conducted with 60 people in Australia who consider themselves to have an alcohol or other drug addiction, dependence or habit, we explore their accounts of stigma, finding experiences of stigma to be common, multiple and strikingly diverse. We argue that by treating stigma as politically productive - as a contingent biopolitically performative process rather than as a stable marker of some kind of anterior difference - we can better understand what it achieves. This allows us to consider not simply how the 'disease' of addiction can be destigmatised, or even whether the 'diseasing' of addiction is itself stigmatising (although this would seem a key question), but whether the very problematisation of 'addiction' in the first place constitutes a stigma process

A novel neural network approach to cDNA microarray image segmentation

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier.Microarray technology has become a great source of information for biologists to understand the workings of DNA which is one of the most complex codes in nature. Microarray images typically contain several thousands of small spots, each of which represents a different gene in the experiment. One of the key steps in extracting information from a microarray image is the segmentation whose aim is to identify which pixels within an image represent which gene. This task is greatly complicated by noise within the image and a wide degree of variation in the values of the pixels belonging to a typical spot. In the past there have been many methods proposed for the segmentation of microarray image. In this paper, a new method utilizing a series of artificial neural networks, which are based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Kohonen networks, is proposed. The proposed method is applied to a set of real-world cDNA images. Quantitative comparisons between the proposed method and commercial software GenePix(®) are carried out in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). This method is shown to not only deliver results comparable and even superior to existing techniques but also have a faster run time.This work was funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61174136 and 61104041, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK2011598, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project of China under Grant No. 2011DFA12910, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany