Helen Keane
Biographic Data
| ID | 333527 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Helen Keane |
| GIVEN NAMES | Helen |
| FAMILY NAME | Keane |
| SIGNATURE | KEANE H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6042-306X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 251 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Inscribing Alcohol Realities: Gender Dualism in Researcher Accounts of Night-Time Violence
In public debate about gender inequality and violence, gender is frequently framed as an ideological construct in competition with more amenable, material drivers. This paper examines how such representations are produced, analyzing the performative effects of a sex−gender dualism in interviews with alcohol policy researchers discussing “alcohol-fueled violence” in the night-time economy. Demarcating the natural and the social, this “inscription …
Mindfulness and resilience: The experiences of global majority students in a mindfulness intervention Programme at a UK university
Wellbeing in higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom has been increasingly prioritised for many institutions, with a growing demand for student support requests. There are various determinants in life that can influence mental health. As such, protected characteristics, including race, can indicate that students who are Black or Asian (global majority (GM)) may be more prone to mental health concerns. Consequently, universities are becoming i…
Everyday Intoxications: A Qualitative Analysis of Young People's Alcohol and Other Drug Consumption
Much sociological research on young people's drug consumption seeks to push past the narrow public health focus on risk and harm by centering pleasure as a key dynamic shaping the motivations and outcomes of these practices. This scholarship demonstrates the limits of a myopic focus on danger by examining, for example, meaningful forms of intimacy, social connection, and generative embodied pleasures that form alongside drug consumption. This oft…
The best spin’: Discourses of vaping intoxication, pleasure, and ‘poisoning’
Anti-tobacco public health campaigns portray e-cigarettes and cigarettes as interchangeable nicotine-delivery systems, describing 'vapes' as a gateway to combustible tobacco use. Some vape users, however, portray vaping as producing a qualitatively different drug experience, describing the pursuit of fleeting, dizzy moments of intoxication sometimes described as 'head spins'. Recent anti-vape campaigns have seized upon the language of head spins,…
Choreographing meaningfulness: Boys’ experiences of dance in primary school
This study critically examines boys’ experiences in primary school dance, drawing on a child-centred qualitative case study conducted across two UK primary schools. Responding to calls for more inclusive and equitable physical education (PE) practices, the research foregrounds pupil voice through an expanded ‘write, draw, show, tell’ (WDST) method, enhanced by the innovative inclusion of emojis, creating the ‘write, draw, show, tell, emoji’ (WDST…
Innocent Addictions: Discourse Analysis of Media Coverage of Pharmaceutical Dependence in Australia
Media coverage of non-medical pharmaceutical use has consistently presented it to be a “different” kind of drug problem, one that involves substances not typically thought of as drugs of abuse or addiction and among people not normally associated with illicit drugs and the “criminal addict.” Though differential media treatment of dependence on criminalized drugs versus pharmaceutical products is well documented in the North American context, less…
Improving understandings of trauma and alcohol and other drug-related problems: A social research agenda
The drinking at home woman: Between alcohol harms and domestic experiments
This article examines the figure of the 'drinking at home woman' as she appeared in the particular cultural and historical location of the Australian COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. It draws on media accounts of women's drinking which featured in Australian publications during this time. Using the notion of figuration as developed by Claudia Castañeda, the article argues that the woman who drinks at home is enacted as a feminised problem sub…
Purposeful play: Exploring a bar-based, anti-tobacco intervention for young adults
Social smoking is increasingly prevalent among young Americans and often takes place in nightlife social settings. Yet, few smoking interventions are embedded in these settings. This paper focuses on space, embodiment, and practice to explore young adults’ experiences of COMMUNE, a bar-based anti-tobacco intervention for ‘Hipster’ young adults; a group with shared aesthetics and interests, and high smoking rates. We conducted in-depth interviews …
Noticed and then Forgotten: Gender in Alcohol Policy Stakeholder Responses to Alcohol and Violence
In this article, we analyse interview data on how alcohol policy stakeholders in Australia, Canada and Sweden understand the relationship between men, masculinities, alcohol and violence. Using influential feminist scholarship on public policy and liberal political theory to analyse interviews with 42 alcohol policy stakeholders, we argue that while these stakeholders view men’s violence as a key issue for intervention, masculinities are backgrou…
Gendering practices in quantitative research on alcohol and violence: Comparing research from Australia, Canada and Sweden
The hammer and the nail: The triple lock of methods, realities and institutional contexts in Australian research on nightlife violence
The analytical, the political and the personal: Swedish stakeholder narratives about alcohol policy at football stadiums
For public health interventions to be effective, they need to be supported or at least accepted by those affected, and social policy should therefore be understood as political and strategic. This raises questions about the relationship between the analytical, the political and the personal in policy processes. This article offers an in-depth analysis of such issues, as they were enacted during interviews with Swedish alcohol policy stakeholders.…
How feminist knowledge is made in and beyond disciplines
This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia’s humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but…
Part of Culture or Toxic Substance? Realities in Transition in Australian and Canadian Alcohol Policy Documents
This article analyzes alcohol policy documents through the framework of ontological politics developed by science and technology studies theorists John Law and Annemarie Mol. Specifically, it analyzes seven Australian and Canadian documents from 2006 to 2020, focusing on different enactments of alcohol as a harm-producing substance that requires regulation. The article identifies and discusses two co-existing realities of alcohol enacted in these…
A normalised future of addiction
Displacements of gender: Research on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy
Alcohol-related violence', especially among young people participating in the night-time economy (NTE), has been the subject of intense public and policy debate in Australia. Previous sociological work has highlighted the relationship between men, masculinities and violence, but this relationship has received little attention in the research that tends to garner policy attention. In this article, we focus on the treatment of gender in Australian …
Making gender along the way: Women, men and harm in Australian alcohol policy
Analysis of alcohol policy suggests women are marked out for special attention while men and masculinities are often ignored. In this paper, we employ Carol Bacchi’s work on ‘gendering practices’ and John Law’s concept of ‘collateral realities’ to examine how gender is constituted in Australian alcohol policy. For Bacchi, policies actively produce what it is possible for ‘men’ and ‘women’ to become. For Law, realities are constituted through meth…
Naked loan selfies: Becoming collateral, becoming pornography
Naked loan selfies are a Chinese Internet phenomenon in which naked selfies taken by young women are used as a form of collateral in peer-to-peer loaning systems. Despite being the subject of sensationalised media coverage in China, naked loan selfies have so far received only very limited academic attention. Drawing on the new materialist ontologies of Karen Barad and Annemarie Mol, this article investigates naked loan selfies as techno-social e…
Obscuring Gendered Difference: The Treatment of Violence in Australian Government Alcohol Policy
Despite public debate about alcohol and public violence among young people in Australia, the issue of masculinities or gender is rarely visible in alcohol policy. Instead, policy recommendations aimed at reducing violence focus on changing the availability and consumption of alcohol. Drawing on concepts from feminist and science and technology studies scholarship, this article analyses how “alcohol-related violence” is constituted as a specific p…
Enacting alcohol realities: Gendering practices in Australian studies on 'alcohol-related presentations' to emergency departments
Alcohol-fuelled violence' and its prevention has been the subject of recent intense policy debate in Australia, with the content of this debate informed by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. In particular, given the well-established relationship between masculinities and violence, the meagre attention paid to the role of gender in alcohol research and policy recommendations stands out as a critical issue. In this article, which dr…
Social Beings, Future Belongings: Reimagining the Social
Social Beings, Future Belongings is a collection of sociological essays that address an increasingly relevant matter: what does belonging look like in the twenty-first century? The book critically explores the concept of belonging and how it can respond to contemporary problems in not only the traditional domains of citizenship and migration, but also in detention practices, queer and feminist politics, Australian literature and fashion, technolo…
The object in hand: Social science of the syringe
Physical education undergraduate students’ perceptions of their learning using the jigsaw learning method
Recognising the limited research around the use of cooperative learning in higher education, this case study sought to explore physical education students’ perceptions of learning using the jigsaw learning method. It examined the impact of two different aesthetic activities and two different groupings on students’ perceptions of their learning. A purposive sample of 36 third-year undergraduates was selected for the study. Data were collected usin…
Gender, inter/disciplinarity and marginality in the social sciences and humanities: A comparison of six disciplines
Habits: Remaking Addiction
What is 'addiction'? What does it say about us, our social arrangements and our political preoccupations? Where is it going as an idea and what is at stake in its ongoing production? Drawing on ethnog
Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy
The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Austr…
Diagnosing the male steroid user: Drug Use, Body Image and Disordered Masculinity
As steroid use has gained prominence as a dangerous form of substance abuse, two main sets of discourses have been deployed to investigate and ameliorate this emerging public health threat. This article examines these two discursive frameworks and their constitution of the male steroid user as psychologically disordered, drawing on a range of medical and psychological literature. The first framework understands steroid use as a form of illicit dr…
Making gender along the way: Women, men and harm in Australian alcohol policy
Analysis of alcohol policy suggests women are marked out for special attention while men and masculinities are often ignored. In this paper, we employ Carol Bacchi’s work on ‘gendering practices’ and John Law’s concept of ‘collateral realities’ to examine how gender is constituted in Australian alcohol policy. For Bacchi, policies actively produce what it is possible for ‘men’ and ‘women’ to become. For Law, realities are constituted through meth…
Foetal personhood and representations of the absent child in pregnancy loss memorialization
Because mourning and memorializing a miscarriage seems to imply acceptance of foetal personhood, feminists have been reluctant to address the often traumatic but common experience of pregnancy loss. Feminist anthropologists of reproduction have argued that adopting a view of personhood as constructed and negotiated, rather than inherent, solves this dilemma and enables the development of a feminist discourse of pregnancy loss. This article aims t…
On the Biology of Sexed Subjects
2002). On the Biology of Sexed Subjects. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 17, No. 39, pp. 261-277
Gender and Feminism in the Social Sciences: Equity, Excellence and Knowledge in the Disciplines
Feminist scholarship has been central to the success and prominence of the Australian social sciences. The impact and significance of the work of sociologists such as Raewyn Connell and Rosemary Pringle, historians Barbara Caine and Marilyn Lake, philosophers Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens and political scientists Carol Bacchi and Louise Chappell are recognised internationally. But how effective has feminist critique been in reshaping what coun…
Enacting alcohol realities: Gendering practices in Australian studies on 'alcohol-related presentations' to emergency departments
Alcohol-fuelled violence' and its prevention has been the subject of recent intense policy debate in Australia, with the content of this debate informed by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. In particular, given the well-established relationship between masculinities and violence, the meagre attention paid to the role of gender in alcohol research and policy recommendations stands out as a critical issue. In this article, which dr…
Public and Private Practices: Addiction Autobiography and Its Contradictions
This article discusses the genre of popular contemporary addiction autobiography, drawing on two texts written by recovering drug-addicted doctors and one by a recovering alcoholic mother. While presented as straightforward “true stories,” these accounts can be read as sophisticated productions of identity, similar to the stories told in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and literature. The focus is on how these texts both reproduce and undermine not…
Setting Yourself Free: Techniques of Recovery
In self-help discourses of addiction the goal is not cure but recovery, an open-ended process which requires both the adoption of certain styles of conduct and the transformation of the self. While defining recovery as a spiritual awakening, popular self-help guides also provide practical techniques of daily living for recovering addicts: from how to attend parties to how to discover one’s inner voice. Using Foucault’s notion of technologies of t…
Gender, inter/disciplinarity and marginality in the social sciences and humanities: A comparison of six disciplines
All gates lead to smoking: The 'gateway theory', e-cigarettes and the remaking of nicotine
Healthy Adults and Maternal Bodies: Reformulations of Gender in Australian Alcohol Guidelines
This article examines the formulations of gender and sexual difference in Australian public health texts on drinking, focussing on the 2009 Australian guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol. These guidelines set a single level of low risk drinking for ‘healthy men and women’, in contrast to the gender differentiated levels found in earlier recommendations. At the same time they demonstrate an increased focus on the risks of ‘mate…
Adventures of the Addicted Brain
Displacements of gender: Research on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy
Alcohol-related violence', especially among young people participating in the night-time economy (NTE), has been the subject of intense public and policy debate in Australia. Previous sociological work has highlighted the relationship between men, masculinities and violence, but this relationship has received little attention in the research that tends to garner policy attention. In this article, we focus on the treatment of gender in Australian …
Female vulnerability and susceptible brains: Gendered discourses of addiction
Despite clear evidence that men use illicit drugs more than women, use them at higher levels and use them from an earlier age, female vulnerability has been a central theme of medical, public health, and popular discourse on drug use. Discourses of vulnerability and norms of responsibility for familial and social wellbeing combine to produce women’s drug use as more unnatural and more deviant than men’s use. This article draws on Campbell’s notio…
Feminism and the Complexities of Gender and Health
Feminist research and activism have made a distinctive contribution to social studies of health and have also had a significant impact on public health policy. Gender is widely recognised as a key driver in the social determination of health and is a well-established category of analysis in fields such as the sociology of health. As a response to Broom, this article focuses on two ways in which feminist social science has complicated the understa…
Obscuring Gendered Difference: The Treatment of Violence in Australian Government Alcohol Policy
Despite public debate about alcohol and public violence among young people in Australia, the issue of masculinities or gender is rarely visible in alcohol policy. Instead, policy recommendations aimed at reducing violence focus on changing the availability and consumption of alcohol. Drawing on concepts from feminist and science and technology studies scholarship, this article analyses how “alcohol-related violence” is constituted as a specific p…
Internet addiction? Temporality and life online in the networked society
Recent literature has explored the processes of global change associated with the social relations, technologies, and economies of time, as well as the move from clock time to event time and network time. Others have focused on the 'presence bleed' evident in technologically-mediated work. A harried pace of life is exacerbated in what Judy Wajcman calls an 'acceleration society'. She points to how technologies can change the nature of current pra…
The drinking at home woman: Between alcohol harms and domestic experiments
This article examines the figure of the 'drinking at home woman' as she appeared in the particular cultural and historical location of the Australian COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. It draws on media accounts of women's drinking which featured in Australian publications during this time. Using the notion of figuration as developed by Claudia Castañeda, the article argues that the woman who drinks at home is enacted as a feminised problem sub…
The analytical, the political and the personal: Swedish stakeholder narratives about alcohol policy at football stadiums
For public health interventions to be effective, they need to be supported or at least accepted by those affected, and social policy should therefore be understood as political and strategic. This raises questions about the relationship between the analytical, the political and the personal in policy processes. This article offers an in-depth analysis of such issues, as they were enacted during interviews with Swedish alcohol policy stakeholders.…
How feminist knowledge is made in and beyond disciplines
This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia’s humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but…
Naked loan selfies: Becoming collateral, becoming pornography
Naked loan selfies are a Chinese Internet phenomenon in which naked selfies taken by young women are used as a form of collateral in peer-to-peer loaning systems. Despite being the subject of sensationalised media coverage in China, naked loan selfies have so far received only very limited academic attention. Drawing on the new materialist ontologies of Karen Barad and Annemarie Mol, this article investigates naked loan selfies as techno-social e…
Work (still) in progress: Establishing the value of gendered innovations in the social sciences
The extensive significance of feminist and gender research clearly \ndoes not need demonstrating to the audience of this specific journal; yet \nsuch recognition of its importance is far from being universal. Feminist \neconomics belongs to a class of approaches stigmatized by the mainstream neoclassical discipline as ‘heterodox’. Feminist philosophy, like \nfeminist economics, is largely published outside the discipline's most \nprestigious jour…
Innocent Addictions: Discourse Analysis of Media Coverage of Pharmaceutical Dependence in Australia
Media coverage of non-medical pharmaceutical use has consistently presented it to be a “different” kind of drug problem, one that involves substances not typically thought of as drugs of abuse or addiction and among people not normally associated with illicit drugs and the “criminal addict.” Though differential media treatment of dependence on criminalized drugs versus pharmaceutical products is well documented in the North American context, less…
The toxic womb: Fetal1alcohol syndrome, alcoholism and the female body
Adventures of the Addicted Brain
Setting Yourself Free: Techniques of Recovery
In self-help discourses of addiction the goal is not cure but recovery, an open-ended process which requires both the adoption of certain styles of conduct and the transformation of the self. While defining recovery as a spiritual awakening, popular self-help guides also provide practical techniques of daily living for recovering addicts: from how to attend parties to how to discover one’s inner voice. Using Foucault’s notion of technologies of t…
Public and Private Practices: Addiction Autobiography and Its Contradictions
This article discusses the genre of popular contemporary addiction autobiography, drawing on two texts written by recovering drug-addicted doctors and one by a recovering alcoholic mother. While presented as straightforward “true stories,” these accounts can be read as sophisticated productions of identity, similar to the stories told in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and literature. The focus is on how these texts both reproduce and undermine not…
On the Biology of Sexed Subjects
2002). On the Biology of Sexed Subjects. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 17, No. 39, pp. 261-277
Critiques of harm reduction, morality and the promise of human rights
Anabolic Steroids and Dependence
This paper examines the difficulties of applying the construct “dependence” to anabolic steroids (AS) use. It argues that although there is clinical evidence for AS dependence, there are uncertainties related to the requirement of psychoactivity, the mechanism of dependence, and the distinctive practices of AS use. The paper suggests that these ambiguities are due as much to features of the concept of dependence as to lack of understanding of AS …
Disorders of Desire: Addiction and Problems of Intimacy
Diagnosing the male steroid user: Drug Use, Body Image and Disordered Masculinity
As steroid use has gained prominence as a dangerous form of substance abuse, two main sets of discourses have been deployed to investigate and ameliorate this emerging public health threat. This article examines these two discursive frameworks and their constitution of the male steroid user as psychologically disordered, drawing on a range of medical and psychological literature. The first framework understands steroid use as a form of illicit dr…
Pleasure and discipline in the uses of Ritalin
Intoxication, harm and pleasure: An analysis of the Australian National Alcohol Strategy
This article contrasts two understandings of intoxication. The first, found in public health discourse, constructs intoxication as a harm produced by risky alcohol consumption and highlights its many negative consequences for individual and social well-being. The model of intoxication as a harm dominates the new Australian National Alcohol Strategy, which includes the reduction of intoxication as one of four priority areas. The second understandi…
Foucault on methadone: Beyond biopower
Foetal personhood and representations of the absent child in pregnancy loss memorialization
Because mourning and memorializing a miscarriage seems to imply acceptance of foetal personhood, feminists have been reluctant to address the often traumatic but common experience of pregnancy loss. Feminist anthropologists of reproduction have argued that adopting a view of personhood as constructed and negotiated, rather than inherent, solves this dilemma and enables the development of a feminist discourse of pregnancy loss. This article aims t…
Variations in addiction: The molecular and the molar in neuroscience and pain medicine
The politics of visibility: Drug users and the spaces of drug use
Nicotine control: E-cigarettes, smoking and addiction
Categorising methadone: Addiction and analgesia
Making smokers different with nicotine: NRT and quitting
Healthy Adults and Maternal Bodies: Reformulations of Gender in Australian Alcohol Guidelines
This article examines the formulations of gender and sexual difference in Australian public health texts on drinking, focussing on the 2009 Australian guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol. These guidelines set a single level of low risk drinking for ‘healthy men and women’, in contrast to the gender differentiated levels found in earlier recommendations. At the same time they demonstrate an increased focus on the risks of ‘mate…
Making Methamphetamine in Drug Policy and Consumer Accounts
In this chapter we build on the analysis of scientific research conducted in Chapter 2, focusing on the enactment of methamphetamine use and addiction in two further discursive contexts. First, drawing on Carol Bacchi’s (2009, x) observation that policy does not simply ‘address’ issues and problems but actually ‘shapes’ them, we illuminate the collateral realities at work to stabilise methamphetamine use and addiction in drug policy, using Austra…
Conclusion
In concluding this book, we wish to take quite seriously a question raised in Chapter 6 about the effects of scientising obesity as addiction. We asked about the fate of addiction in light of this relatively recent development, and the prospect that, surely, if overeating — something we are told many people do chronically — is a kind of addictive behaviour, addiction must be on the move from the margin to the centre. We are all, this development …
Stabilising Stimulants: Amphetamine Dependence and Methamphetamine Addiction
Alcohol and heroin have traditionally been constituted as the classic drugs of addiction. In recent years, however, the amphetamines, a group of synthetic stimulant drugs, have assumed an increasingly prominent place in debates on addiction. In this chapter, we explore influential psychological and neuroscientific research on amphetamine and methamphetamine as case studies in changing realities of addiction. We argue, in turn, that ‘amphetamine d…
Stepping to the Side of Addiction: Everyday Realities of Overeating and Obesity
Having explored in Chapter 6 the collateral realities being made in scientific literature on overeating and obesity, we next track these collateral realities — addiction, drugs, the social (or environment) and the body — into public accounts to see how closely the two align. Our aim here is to identify the commonalities and differences between the two discursive domains, speculating on where, and how effectively, the scientific approach is holdin…
Models of Addiction
The use of psychoactive substances in order to alter mood or consciousness, alleviate suffering, improve performance or enhance social relations is characteristic of human cultures. For some individuals, the use of these substances becomes a pattern of habitual and persistent consumption that results in negative physical, emotional, relational and social effects. The range and intensity of these harmful effects is highly varied, depending on the …
Junk: The Neuroscience of Food Addiction and Obesity
Can food be understood as a kind of drug? This depends on the way in which the notion of the ‘drug’ is itself defined. Drugs can be seen in terms of Mary Douglas’s definition of pollution — as matter out of place (Keane 2002). In this sense, the category of drugs is an entirely political one: it contains all substances the consumption of which attracts social opprobrium at a given time. Indeed, foods such as sugar, fat and even staples such as br…
Psychology (42 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Political science (36 works) · Medicine (30 works) · Psychiatry (24 works) · Criminology (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Addiction (21 works) · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes (20 works) · Social Psychology (19 works)