The line of vulnerability in a recovery assemblage.

From a developmental-psychological perspective, young people's recovery from drug misuse requires building up internal resilience and mobilising external resources to develop and maintain a shield of invulnerability. Vulnerability, in this context, is typically understood in terms of the material, social and/or affective conditions of drug use. These conditions are often targeted in prevention and intervention efforts, while also featuring in the emergence of recovery-oriented policy and treatment agendas internationally. In these ways, drug treatment programs implicitly impose vulnerability as a pre-condition to justify intervention and control, just as vulnerabilities are reproduced through the physical and social isolation that individuals experience in treatment. In this article we challenge normative understandings of recovery that regard vulnerability as an inherent condition of 'risk' and 'relapse' for those 'in recovery'. The article bridges interdisciplinary research to offer an analysis grounded in Deleuzian ideas for understanding vulnerability - an area for which his philosophy has been largely overlooked. As the case of recovery unravels, we analyse vulnerability in recovery as affirmative; as an ongoing transformative force of becoming-well.

Aging with drug use: Theorizing intersectionally with material gerontology and critical drug studies.

Rethinking old age and what aging means within the context and materiality of drug use, this paper asks, 'how does drug use matter in old age?' and follows a series of conceptual arguments to link aging studies and critical drug studies with material gerontology in an intersectional analysis. To do this, four research areas are reviewed to conceptualize habitual drug use in old age. First, aging is explored through its biological, subjective, and socio-material representations. Secondly, the merits of material gerontological thinking are discussed and developed in connection to marginalization and related intersectionality representing the third and fourth areas of research, respectively. Conceptual results suggest a model of 'embodied-drugged-aging,' an integrated conceptual approach which neither categorizes nor abstracts aging with drug use from its social and material contexts.

Assembling and diversifying social contexts of recovery.

Recovery from drug use is receiving increased attention in critical drug studies. Researchers point out the importance of scrutinizing the term and its meanings anew in order to better understand drug use treatment policies and their effects on the individuals they target. Informed by relational ontological thinking, this article analyses a series of empirical accounts of recovery experiences, and offers a critical assessment of the social contexts of recovery. Qualitative data collected in Azerbaijan and Germany provide distinctive reports of the differentiated experiences of youth as they make and re-make sense of their recovery within specific recovery contexts. Discussions reveal how recovery advances in relations between human and nonhuman actors including spaces, bodies, affects, and practices. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that recovery may be framed as an emergent and dynamic context that becomes with and from drug use.