Interactive Seminar

Day 1: Tuesday, 13 September

This session will explore how practices of recovery from drugs and alcohol, social science and filmmaking, can be reconfigured together in order to create novel collaborative ways of doing recovery. Combining methodological expertise in social research methods, art and filmmaking, and empirical studies of recovery as a collective matter of care, we document the gradual transformations emerging through the involvement of people in recovery with artistic practices. Drawing on a pilot study conducted in collaboration with the filmmaker Melanie Manchot and the Liverpool Biennial of contemporary art in 2019-2020, the session advances novel methodologies for researching recovery that generate new interdisciplinary approaches to engaging health and well-being and proposes creative methods that challenge social scientific practices and assumptions of researchers. Our pilot study investigates how interdisciplinary collaborations can contribute to recovery practices through the involvement of people in recovery in filming and cinema-based workshops. Guided by a methodological approach which is committed to advancing the study of recovery from drugs and alcohol and health policy from an interdisciplinary perspective, the session reflects on the challenges of researching recovery and the potential for conceptual and methodological innovation in the social sciences.