Cameron Duff
Biographic Data
| ID | 72109 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cameron Duff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cameron |
| FAMILY NAME | Duff |
| SIGNATURE | DUFF C |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9792-0385 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 92 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 856 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
The labour of attachment
Commoning describes a means of forging common value in the shared labour by which new experiences of community, of being in common, are realised. It is usually understood by way of a congeries of habits, affects and practices critical of normative models of social and economic organisation typical of late capitalism. These innovations have provided scholars and activists with productive ideas for imagining postcapitalist futures, and new ways of …
The affective value of care
This paper argues that efforts to assess the outcomes of social care delivery ought to emphasise the generation of affective value . This value derives from the affective labour of caregiving – and the novel subjectivities that are the principal expressions of this labour – as it is organised in the delivery of social support. We ground this claim in analysis of qualitative data collected within housing assistance, community mental health, and su…
The affective organisation of social infrastructures
Recent discussions of social infrastructures provide rich insights into the ways health and social care organisations deliver services in the care economy and the value and impact of these services. Social infrastructures are regarded both as means of providing social support, particularly in disadvantaged communities, and as outcomes of this support in that effective social care is known to promote social cohesion. This suggests that services ma…
Reflections of a Deleuzian People to Come
This article presents a discussion with Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar, in which we explore some of the social and political contexts of contemporary creative practice from a Deleuzian perspective. Our discussion references work from across Afshar’s career, though we focus on a recent exhibition ( The Fold) staged as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, in late 2023 into 2024. This exhibitio…
Caring for innovation
Purpose Across the public sector, and especially in the delivery of health and social care and support, practicing innovation is a difficult and seldom rewarding activity. The organisational barriers inhibiting innovation adoption in healthcare settings have been widely discussed. What is less well understood is what motivates staff to persist with innovation efforts despite these barriers. This paper contributes to recent studies of the role of …
Choreographing, tailoring and dialoguing care in residential rehabilitation
Alcohol and other drug residential rehabilitation is an abstinence-based modality for assisting people with long-standing concerns associated with their substance use. While ubiquitous, models of care in residential rehabilitation services vary widely and the impacts of the care delivered within them remain contentious. Critically, therapeutic processes in residential rehabilitation remain under-theorised with little attention given to the charac…
Mapping the risk environment for peers with lived-living experience working in the alcohol and other drugs sector in Queensland
Findings highlight the need for advocacy towards legal reform and the creation of inclusive organisational cultures. Recognising and valuing the LLE of peer workers is essential for enhancing harm reduction initiatives and promoting the wellbeing of PWUDs. Addressing these macro- and micro-risk factors, including the importance of peer supervision, can improve peer workers' efficacy in providing meaningful support within their communities
The emotional labour of peer work
This article focuses on the workplace experiences of peer workers with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in mental healthcare settings in Australia. Our article is located at the intersection of political, social, cultural, and legislative forces that have fostered the development of peer work as a paid profession. We draw on the concept of stigma to analyse findings from qualitative interviews with peer workers conducted in [s…
Negotiating Care and Control
In this paper, we build on literature examining care practices in harm reduction services to investigate some of the reasons why women who use drugs access, remain in or leave harm reduction services. Through the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork collected at two Danish harm reduction services, including 29 interviews with women who use drugs, this study examines how care is practised in these services, what conditions these practices and how wo…
Guiding principles for breaking down drug-related stigma in academic writing
Regimes of Drug Desires
Long-acting injectable depot buprenorphine is the latest opioid agonist therapy to be offered in Australia. There has been increasing scholarly interest in the lived experience of this treatment; however, the current qualitative research on this issue is limited to reports on the benefits and challenges individuals experience during treatment. This study expands and complicates this body of work by delving into the social, affective, and material…
The Ipeds assemblage
The US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) recently ended their anti-doping partnership amidst controversy. We treat this decision, and the motivations underpinning it, as a means of exploring the complexities of anti-doping norms and the blurred lines between image and performance enhancing drug (IPED) use in sport and wider society. Drawing ideas from assemblage thinking, we analyse the evolving power dynamics su…
Learning under lockdown
PurposeThe purpose of this study is to reflect on and analyse the sensory experiences related to the transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research seeks to understand how these experiences have influenced the integration of work practices into home and family life and the subsequent adaptations and embodied learning that arise in response.Design/methodology/approachThe authors' research approach incorporates autoethnographi…
Diversifying and enriching theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary study of alcohol and other drug use
The ends of an assemblage of health
Speed and space
The posthumanist turn in health and wellbeing research has paid attention to the qualities of space, particularly through the work of geographers. Although a range of these qualities have been explicitly articulated and well explored, a clear omission in the literature has been ‘speed’ - an important quality in its own right, and an element of all other qualities. This review paper takes a good look at speed. First it considers what speed is and …
Wellbeing as social care
Time spent within either mental health inpatient units or residential substance use treatment services affects subjectivities and social relations in complex ways. This paper draws on recent currents in ‘assemblage thinking’, alongside Lauren Berlant's discussion of ‘the commons’, to explore these disruptions and propose new ways of thinking about the relations of support, wellbeing and care that may emerge within treatment. Care within these spa…
A conversation about recovery and political activism
Practising recovery
The line of vulnerability in a recovery assemblage
Discounting in Natural Resource Damage Assessment
The goal of natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) is to compensate the public for losses to natural resources from past or ongoing hazardous releases, including losses that may persist into the future. Compensation is delivered in the form of restoration projects. Resolving NRDA liability requires balancing losses and restoration benefits over multiple decades and converting them into a present value for calculating appropriate damages. For t…
The Flexible Workplace
Mutual visibility and interaction
The antidepressant in women’s lifeworlds
A geology of drug morals
On the Role of Affect and Practice in the Production of Place
Michel de Certeau's account of the modern city emphasises the 'doing' and 'making' residents undertake in an attempt to render a city more amenable to an 'art' of resistance. Yet, in attending to this doing and making, de Certeau has largely ignored the felt and affective dimensions of city life. Edward Casey provides a compelling means of interrogating these affective dimensions, distinguishing 'thick' and 'thin' places in everyday life. Thick p…
Assemblages of Health
This book presents a review of Deleuze's key methods and concepts in the course of exploring how these methods may be applied in contemporary studies of health and illness. Taken from a Deleuzian perspective, health and wellbeing will be characterized as a discontinuous process of affective and relational transitions. The book argues that health, conceived in terms of the quality of life, is advanced or facilitated in the provision of new affecti…
Networks, resources and agencies
Exploring the role of ‘enabling places’ in promoting recovery from mental illness
Matter beginning to matter
The pleasure in context
Accounting for context
This paper addresses some of the major implications of actor-network theory (ANT) for research on the consumption of alcohol and other drugs (AOD). It focuses on the significance of ANT's rejection of the subject-object distinction for recent debates in human and cultural geography regarding the role of social contexts in mediating the character and experience of AOD consumption. In exploring this theme, I apply insights derived from the work of …
Atmospheres of recovery
This article investigates recovery from mental health problems with reference to recent geographical analysis of affective atmospheres. In so doing, my research responds to recent calls to clarify the ways social, spatial and political factors may promote or impede recovery. As it is normally deployed, the notion of recovery emphasises the deeply personal character of rehabilitation from mental illness. It describes neither the full restoration o…
The affective right to the city
This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests t…
Putting Belonging into Place
This paper explores the meaning and mechanics of belonging with a particular focus on the role of place and place-making. It explores the ways people come to achieve a sense of belonging with reference to recent theoretical treatments of place, territory, and mobility. We ground our discussion in analysis of an ethnographic case ofEcuadorian families who have migrated toTrentino in northernItaly. Most families miss the social relationships and pl…
The affective commons of Coworking
What kind of common project is Coworking? Coworking was first presented as a novel model for organising autonomous, authentic and creative labour amid a community of workers who share these progressive aspirations. That this promise has not always been realised in practice has provoked a strong sense of ambivalence among many Coworkers. This article offers a critical assessment of this ambivalence, which we approach by way of a novel theoretical …
Towards a developmental ethology
This article explores the work of French thinker Gilles Deleuze and argues for the application of his central ideas to the study of health and human development. Deleuze's work furnishes a host of ontological and epistemological resources for such analysis, ushering in new methods and establishing new objects of inquiry. Of principal interest are the inventive conceptualizations of affect, multiplicity and relationality that Deleuze proposes, and…
Going out, getting about
Drawing from recent affective geographies of drinking and drunkenness, this article explores the affective atmospheres of spaces of mobility in Melbourne's night-time economy and how these atmospheres shape the experience of alcohol-related problems. Our discussion is grounded in the analysis of interview data collected in 2012 among 60 young adults living in Melbourne. Participants included youth residing in the inner-city who reported taking a …
Mental Ill Health, Recovery and the Family Assemblage
Governing drug use otherwise
Contemporary drug policy debates are riven by a protracted antagonism between discourses that emphasise addiction, habit and despair, and those that endorse recreation, pleasure and self-control. This article eschews this antagonism by examining drug use in relation to what Michel Foucault called an ethics of care. My goal is to begin to imagine how drug use may be governed otherwise, in ways that avoid the normalisation associated with existing …
Drugs and Youth Cultures
This paper explores recent shifts in the meaning and culture of adolescent drug use, contrasting developments in the United Kingdom and Australia. Of particular interest will be the claim that drug use has become a normal feature of young people's life-experience. The paper draws upon Howard Parker's 'normalization thesis', arguing that Parker's approach has some value in accounting for the changing nature of adolescent drug use in Australia. Ava…
Understanding the vital emergence and expression of aging
Family assemblages
In this paper, we develop and extend the emerging concept of 'family assemblages' to theorise the bodies, objects, habits, spaces, technologies, discourses and affects that participate in family life. We argue that existing conceptualisations of the family tend towards anthropocentrism, a sundering of the world into active human subjects and passive non-human objects. Assemblage theory offers a means of overcoming this anthropocentrism in order t…
Tendencies and trajectories
Posthumanist ontologies have been employed in theoretical and empirical research in human geography to explore the production of subjectivity in processes, events and relations. Similar approaches have been adopted in critical drug research to emphasise the production of subjectivity in events of drug consumption. Within each body of work questions remain regarding the durations and becomings of subjectivity. Responding to these questions, we int…
Mapping the spatial and affective composition of care in a drug consumption room in Germany
This paper attends to the activity of care as it is articulated, enacted and contested within a drug consumption room in Germany. Drawing on empirical data generated during a long-term participatory ethnography conducted in Frankfurt, our analysis attends to the ‘invisible labors’ of care, alongside the more visible practices by which care is enacted and contested. We unsettle depictions of care as innate and unproblematic components of service d…
The ends of an assemblage of health
Counterpublic health and the design of drug services for methamphetamine consumers in Melbourne
This article is interested in how notions of the 'public' are conceived, marshalled and enacted in drug-treatment responses to methamphetamine use in Melbourne, Australia. After reviewing qualitative data collected among health-care providers and methamphetamine consumers, we draw on the work of Michael Warner to argue that services for methamphetamine consumers in Melbourne betray ongoing tensions between 'public' and 'counterpublic' constituenc…
Unravelling subjectivity, embodied experience and (taking) psychotropic medication
This paper explores how distinctions between 'intended' and 'side' effects are troubled in personal narratives of taking psychotropic medications. Grounded in interviews with 29 participants diagnosed with mental illness in Victoria, Australia between February and December 2014, we consider how people interpret pharmaceutical compounds beyond their desired or intended effects, and how such effects shape and transform subjectivity and their relati…
"How can we make it work for you?" Enabling sporting assemblages for disabled young people
Whole onflow', the productive event
The importance of culture and context
This paper explores the place of risk and risk management within contemporary Australian drug policy debates, focusing on the Howard Government's Tough on Drugs strategy. In exploring the conceptual bases of this strategy, this paper suggests that the characterisations of risk discernible in Australian debates have been dominated by a narrow group of 'expert' discourses leading to a range of gaps and omissions in the development of drugs policies…
Drugs and Youth Cultures
This paper explores recent shifts in the meaning and culture of adolescent drug use, contrasting developments in the United Kingdom and Australia. Of particular interest will be the claim that drug use has become a normal feature of young people's life-experience. The paper draws upon Howard Parker's 'normalization thesis', arguing that Parker's approach has some value in accounting for the changing nature of adolescent drug use in Australia. Ava…
Alcohol Marketing and the Media
The marketing and promotion of alcohol have attracted considerable controversy in Australia in recent years. Many researchers argue that the active promotion of alcohol has led to increases in alcohol consumption in Australia, particularly among the young, as well as a range of alcohol-related harms and problems. Others contest this view, whilst the alcohol industry itself contends that alcohol advertising is more concerned with winning and maint…
Drug use as a ‘practice of the self’
Party drugs and party people
Charging” and “Blowing Out”
Recent increases in the use of gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB) in club and rave settings have been associated with a series of acute health problems including overdose. Drawing upon research recently completed in Melbourne, Australia among a sample of young club and rave patrons, this article explores the knowledge, attitudes and related “risk-behaviors” of individuals who use GHB, as well as the various cultures and contexts surrounding its use. A m…
Driving, drug use behaviour and risk perceptions of nightclub attendees in Victoria, Australia
Towards a theory of drug use contexts
Critical discussions of the problem of context are surprisingly rare in drug policy debates. Despite wide acceptance of the importance of social contexts in shaping illicit drug use and related risks and harms, few accounts exist of the nature and organisation of these contexts, their defining features and constituent properties. This oversight confounds efforts to identify the specific means by which contexts actually shape illicit drug use and …
The pleasure in context
The drifting city
The British Columbia Alcohol and other Drug Monitoring System
This pilot project is a province-wide and nationally=supported collaboration intended to add value to existing monitoring and surveillance exercises that currently exist and are being developed in Canada. The fundamental aim is to create a system that generates a timely flow of data on hazardous patterns of substance use and related harms so as to inform public debate, to support effective policy, and to facilitate policy-relevant epidemiological…
The Canadian Recreational Drug Use Survey
In late 2006, pilot research was initiated in two western Canadian sites (Vancouver and Victoria) to systematically monitor patterns and trends in three specific illicit drug user populations: club and rave party attendees, adolescent street involved injection and non-injection drug users, and adult injection drug users. These sentinel groups were selected because of elevated rates of alcohol and other drug use within these populations and contex…
Enabling places and enabling resources
In this digest, Cameron Duff proposes a different way of understanding the risk environment literature as it relates to the implementation of harm reduction. He argues that we need to look beyond the everyday tools of harm reduction like needle and syringe programs and peer education to 'enabling places' and 'enabling resources', areas where public policy makers and social planners can ensure the delivery of more innovative harm reduction policie…
Networks, resources and agencies
On the Role of Affect and Practice in the Production of Place
Michel de Certeau's account of the modern city emphasises the 'doing' and 'making' residents undertake in an attempt to render a city more amenable to an 'art' of resistance. Yet, in attending to this doing and making, de Certeau has largely ignored the felt and affective dimensions of city life. Edward Casey provides a compelling means of interrogating these affective dimensions, distinguishing 'thick' and 'thin' places in everyday life. Thick p…
Towards a developmental ethology
This article explores the work of French thinker Gilles Deleuze and argues for the application of his central ideas to the study of health and human development. Deleuze's work furnishes a host of ontological and epistemological resources for such analysis, ushering in new methods and establishing new objects of inquiry. Of principal interest are the inventive conceptualizations of affect, multiplicity and relationality that Deleuze proposes, and…
Ethno-Cultural Differences in the Use of Alcohol and Other Drugs
This article reports on ethno-cultural differences in the use of alcohol and other drugs by using data derived from the Vancouver Youth Drug Reporting System. Data were collected between May and August 2006 among a sample of 514 youth aged 16 to 25. Statistically significant ethno-cultural differences were reported for "lifetime" alcohol and other drugs prevalence; alcohol and other drugs experience in the peer group; parental attitudes; and in t…
A ‘standard joint’? The role of quantity in predicting cannabis-related problems
The ‘standard drink’ concept is widely used as a standardized measure of alcohol consumption. There is no equivalent measure of cannabis consumption, perhaps due to challenges such as varied joint size, tetrahydrocannabinol content, and means of delivery. This study introduces a new measure of cannabis quantity and examines whether it predicts cannabis-related social problems with and without controlling for frequency of use. Cannabis-related pro…
A Canadian perspective on cannabis normalization among adults
Once associated with ‘deviant’ subcultures, the use of cannabis is now common across Canadian society. This has led some to argue that cannabis use is becoming normalized in Canada with important implications for drug policy, law enforcement and public health. This article takes up these issues, reporting the results of a qualitative study involving 165, socially integrated, adult cannabis users in four Canadian cities (Vancouver, Montreal, Toron…
Reassembling (social) contexts
An examination of injection drug use trends in Victoria and Vancouver, BC after the closure of Victoria's only fixed-site needle and syringe programme
Exploring the role of ‘enabling places’ in promoting recovery from mental illness
Accounting for context
This paper addresses some of the major implications of actor-network theory (ANT) for research on the consumption of alcohol and other drugs (AOD). It focuses on the significance of ANT's rejection of the subject-object distinction for recent debates in human and cultural geography regarding the role of social contexts in mediating the character and experience of AOD consumption. In exploring this theme, I apply insights derived from the work of …
Sexual identity and drug use harm among high-risk, active substance users
Research shows that sexual minorities are at greater risk for illicit substance use and related harm than their heterosexual counterparts. This study examines a group of active drug users to assess whether sexual identity predicts increased risk of substance use and harm from ecstasy, ketamine, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and crack. Structured interviews were conducted with participants aged 15 years and older in Vancouver and Victoria, BC, Canad…
The social life of drugs
Sociology (70 works) · Psychology (65 works) · Political science (47 works) · Social Psychology (32 works) · Medicine (31 works) · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk (29 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Psychiatry (28 works) · Social science (28 works) · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes (25 works)