Kiran Pienaar
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 186715 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Kiran Pienaar |
| PRENOMES | Kiran |
| SOBRENOME | Pienaar |
| ASSINATURA | PIENAAR K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4770-7882 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 106 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2014 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Narrating Suffering Through the Lens of Trauma
In recent decades, the concept of “trauma” has been embraced in mental healthcare with “trauma-informed” approaches increasingly used to guide treatment. The turn to “trauma” is also evident in the alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment sector, where it imbues understandings of AOD-related problems, including addiction and overdose. In this article, we combine feminist analyses of mental health with narcofeminist scholarship to analyze trauma as …
Media reporting of cancel culture
Definitions of cancel culture are contested; its meanings and effects are understood in often polarised ways as either an empowering tool for social justice or a dangerous demonising trend. Social media are central to cancel culture as the source of “incriminating” material, the channels through which call-outs and cancellations occur, and sites of meta discussion, debate, and commentary on cancellation, with posts often referred to in reports of…
Undoing Minority Stress
This article queries statistical ways of knowing about “LGBT substance use” and the subject positions they produce. We engage critically with how quantitative knowledge on this topic is generated across social science, psychology and public health and consider its disciplinary effects. This literature reports “higher rates of substance use” among sexual and gender minorities but struggles to explain the disparities it proposes. The most prominent…
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary section of Catalyst
In preparing the tenth anniversary section of Catalyst, the current editorial team met to reflect on the legacy, politico-ethical vision and future of the journal. Using the introduction to the inaugural issue as a prompt for our reflections, we discussed what makes the journal distinctive, how it has contributed to the field of technoscience, the intellectual inheritance of feminist scholarship on which our work builds and the generative associa…
Reflections on Catalyst’s legacy and future
To mark the ten-year anniversary of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, former and current editors reflect on the journal's origins, its contributions to feminist technoscience, and their aspirations for Catalyst in the next ten years and beyond. The discussion was recorded on Zoom, transcribed verbatim and edited for clarity. Presented in the original conversation format, the piece offers insights into the rich histories and intellectual …
Catalyst Origin Stories
To mark the ten-year anniversary of the journal, former and current Catalyst editors reflect on the journal's origins, its contributions to feminist technoscience, and their aspirations for Catalyst in the next ten years and beyond. Presented in conversation format, the piece offers insights into the rich histories and intellectual legacies that have shaped Catalyst, and the feminist ethos that underpins the journal's scholarship and editorial pr…
Narcofeminist affects
While much sociological research suggests that gender dynamics can make alcohol and other drug consumption settings potentially unsafe, these practices can still be highly pleasurable and meaningful for young people. Analysis of influential understandings of young people’s alcohol and other drug consumption highlights how the notion of ‘harm’ is gendered, with men and masculinity rarely addressed, while women are constituted as uniquely vulnerabl…
Covid-19 and the biopolitics of stigma in public housing
The COVID-19 'hard lockdowns' in Melbourne, Australia in 2020 targeted public housing estates thus trading on perceptions of risk associated with public housing as some of the most stigmatised sites in post-industrial cities. This article draws on interviews with Melbourne public housing tenants on their experience of COVID-19 lockdowns to analyse the place of stigma in residents' accounts. Pairing Wacquant et al's (2014) concept of 'territorial …
The dynamics of more-than-human care in depot buprenorphine treatment
Our analysis destabilises commonplace assumptions about a linear, causal relationship between the pharmacological action of depot buprenorphine and experiences of treatment. Instead, it highlights patients' variable experiences of depot buprenorphine, tracing the everyday practices, embodied feelings, expectations and wider networks of care that shape patient experiences. We conclude with some reflections on the implications of our analysis for a…
Remaking Chemsex Event Networks in the Age of HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP)
Let's be honest: it's a party drug', declared the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles, following the approval of Truvada for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Drawing on the accounts of gay and queer-identifying men, we explore the ways in which PrEP has not only made chemsex possible for a new group of people, but has also changed what chemsex is. If the association with HIV infection has helped render chemsex an object…
Competing realities, uncertain diagnoses of infectious disease
Diagnoses of infectious diseases are being transformed as mass self-testing using rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasingly integrated into public health. Widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, RATs are claimed to have many advantages over 'gold-standard' polymerase chain reaction tests, especially their ease of use and production of quick results. Yet, while laboratory studies indicate the value of RATs in detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus anti…
Injecting as a sexual practice
‘Slamsex’ has emerged in gay vernacular in recent years to denote a particular way of taking drugs and a particular kind of sex. Slamming refers in this context to the practice of injecting drugs – typically crystal methamphetamine – intravenously. To pair ‘slamming’ with ‘sex’ is to propose that a particular mode of drug administration is constitutive of a particular kind of sex – a relatively novel idea that deserves some unpacking. What does i…
Improving understandings of trauma and alcohol and other drug-related problems
Staying with the silence
As the name 'talk therapy' suggests, a key aim of alcohol and other drug counselling, psychotherapy and other talk therapies is to discuss issues, concerns and feelings with a health professional. Implicit here is the therapeutic value of talking through issues with a trained professional. But as with all interactions, therapeutic encounters involve silences and pauses as key aspects of the communicative process. Despite their ubiquity in the the…
Rethinking Women’s “Performance and Image-Enhancing Drug Consumption”
Women’s “performance and image-enhancing drug consumption” is a growing phenomenon yet remains an under-studied area of research. This essay reviews the existing literature on women’s consumption and draws on Fraser’s concept of ontopolitically-oriented research to develop an agenda for future research. Ontopolitically-oriented research applies insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to consider the ontological politics of research pra…
Narcofeminism and its multiples
Sociology has a long-standing interest in the consumption of licit and illicit drugs, particularly as a feminist concern with scholars highlighting the ways in which drugs are used as regulatory technologies to control the conduct and subjectivities of women and other marginalised groups. This monograph flips the focus from a feminist sociological concern with drugs as a means of confining minoritised peoples, to explore what they can do as a fem…
Refusing recovery, living a ‘wayward life’
Drawing on cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, this essay reads one woman’s life with drugs and resistance to drug treatment as a feminist act of refusal, a ‘wayward life’ in Hartman’s terms. Wayward lives are those that refuse dominant forms of servitude and push open alternative ways of being. Although living in a different time and location to the young b…
Living and responding at the margins
On 25 November 2021, the editors of this monograph had the honour and pleasure of talking to five founding members of the narcofeminist activist movement from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They discuss the history and vision of the movement, the issues confronting women and gender minorities who use drugs, and the significance of the political context of drug prohibition in shaping their experiences. This article documents this conversation as…
Pandemic policing and the construction of publics
COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the 'hard' lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for u…
Afterword
In this piece we reflect on the tensions and complexities of drug use that narcofeminism has prompted us to grapple with in producing this collection. Narcofeminist approaches challenge us to move beyond simplistic, moralistic frameworks that pathologise and stigmatise those who use drugs, and instead seek more nuanced understandings of the social, cultural and political forces through which drug use materialises. By foregrounding the experiences…
Searching for diagnostic certainty, governing risk
Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine's epistemic system: it serves to explain individual symptoms, classify them into recognizable conditions and determine their prognosis and treatment. Medical tests, or investigative procedures for detecting and monitoring disease, play a central role in diagnosis. While testing promises diagnostic certainty or a definitive risk assessment, it often produces uncertainties and new questions which call for yet furthe…
Testing and Diagnosis as Social Interventions
Kiran Pienaar (KP) and Alan Petersen (AP): Thank you, Annemarie, for agreeing to share your perspectives in this interview. We are delighted to have this opportunity to engage with your insights and scholarly contributions on the sociology of diagnosis. In 2011 you co-edited a special issue of Social Science and Medicine entitled ‘Toward a Sociology of Diagnosis’ in which you called for sociologists to pay more attention to medical diagnosis as a…
The Molecular Turn, Predictive Technologies and Diagnostic Fragmentation
Alan Petersen (AP) and Kiran Pienaar (KP): Thank you, David, for agreeing to share your perspectives in this interview. It is a pleasure and honour to have this opportunity to engage with your insights and scholarly contributions on surveillance medicine and the sociology of diagnosis. Looking back to your early contributions on surveillance medicine, these seem to anticipate recent diagnostic trends. What, if anything, has changed in the interim…
Testing for Life? Regimes of Governance in Diagnosis and Screening
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Enacting ‘more-than-human’ care
Diffracting addicting binaries
Associated with social and individual harm, loss of control and destructive behaviour, addiction is widely considered to be a major social problem. Most models of addiction, including the influential disease model, rely on the volition/compulsion binary, conceptualising addiction as a disorder of compulsion. In order to interrogate this prevailing view, this article draws on qualitative data from interviews with people who describe themselves as …
Basic care as exceptional care
The discrimination faced by people understood to have alcohol or other drug addictions has been the subject of extensive research, with many studies documenting experiences of stigma within healthcare services. Building on this literature, we examine the role of stigma in shaping the healthcare expectations of people seen as affected by alcohol and other drug addictions. Our analysis draws on recent theorisations of stigma as a process of social …
Narcofeminism and its multiples
Sociology has a long-standing interest in the consumption of licit and illicit drugs, particularly as a feminist concern with scholars highlighting the ways in which drugs are used as regulatory technologies to control the conduct and subjectivities of women and other marginalised groups. This monograph flips the focus from a feminist sociological concern with drugs as a means of confining minoritised peoples, to explore what they can do as a fem…
Making publics in a pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed sexual relationships into sharp focus as strict containment measures, including physical distancing and 'stay at home' restrictions, were initiated to control the spread of the virus. Governments in some jurisdictions prevented contact between non-cohabiting sexual partners (except for couples in pre-existing relationships), while community organisations recommended people avoid casual sexual encounters. This arti…
Data-driven intimacy
22, 243-257]', we explore how sexual practices, intimacy and pleasure become 'datafied' through these sensory technologies. Inspired by the concept of the 'sexuality-assemblage', we pose teledildonic-enhanced sex as a 'sexuotechnical-assemblage', a term that highlights the uniquely technological dimensions of sex in the age of teledildonics. Approaching these devices as sexuotechnical-assemblages highlights the generative role of data as lubrican…
Searching for diagnostic certainty, governing risk
Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine's epistemic system: it serves to explain individual symptoms, classify them into recognizable conditions and determine their prognosis and treatment. Medical tests, or investigative procedures for detecting and monitoring disease, play a central role in diagnosis. While testing promises diagnostic certainty or a definitive risk assessment, it often produces uncertainties and new questions which call for yet furthe…
Pandemic policing and the construction of publics
COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the 'hard' lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for u…
Refusing recovery, living a ‘wayward life’
Drawing on cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, this essay reads one woman’s life with drugs and resistance to drug treatment as a feminist act of refusal, a ‘wayward life’ in Hartman’s terms. Wayward lives are those that refuse dominant forms of servitude and push open alternative ways of being. Although living in a different time and location to the young b…
Matters of fact and politics
Claiming rights, making citizens
Narcofeminist affects
While much sociological research suggests that gender dynamics can make alcohol and other drug consumption settings potentially unsafe, these practices can still be highly pleasurable and meaningful for young people. Analysis of influential understandings of young people’s alcohol and other drug consumption highlights how the notion of ‘harm’ is gendered, with men and masculinity rarely addressed, while women are constituted as uniquely vulnerabl…
Remaking Chemsex Event Networks in the Age of HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP)
Let's be honest: it's a party drug', declared the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles, following the approval of Truvada for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Drawing on the accounts of gay and queer-identifying men, we explore the ways in which PrEP has not only made chemsex possible for a new group of people, but has also changed what chemsex is. If the association with HIV infection has helped render chemsex an object…
Managing risks or generating uncertainties? Ambiguous ontologies of testing in Australian healthcare
Medical testing promises to establish certainty by providing a definitive assessment of risk or diagnosis. But can those who rely on tests to offer advice or make clinical decisions be assured of this certainty? This article examines how Australian health professionals, namely clinicians, microbiologists, specialist physicians and health policymakers, delineate the boundary between certainty and uncertainty in their accounts of medical testing. A…
Rethinking Women’s “Performance and Image-Enhancing Drug Consumption”
Women’s “performance and image-enhancing drug consumption” is a growing phenomenon yet remains an under-studied area of research. This essay reviews the existing literature on women’s consumption and draws on Fraser’s concept of ontopolitically-oriented research to develop an agenda for future research. Ontopolitically-oriented research applies insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to consider the ontological politics of research pra…
Afterword
In this piece we reflect on the tensions and complexities of drug use that narcofeminism has prompted us to grapple with in producing this collection. Narcofeminist approaches challenge us to move beyond simplistic, moralistic frameworks that pathologise and stigmatise those who use drugs, and instead seek more nuanced understandings of the social, cultural and political forces through which drug use materialises. By foregrounding the experiences…
Competing realities, uncertain diagnoses of infectious disease
Diagnoses of infectious diseases are being transformed as mass self-testing using rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasingly integrated into public health. Widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, RATs are claimed to have many advantages over 'gold-standard' polymerase chain reaction tests, especially their ease of use and production of quick results. Yet, while laboratory studies indicate the value of RATs in detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus anti…
The "Be All and End All"? Young People, Online Sexual Health Information, Science and Skepticism
In this article, we investigate young people's trust in online sexual health resources. Analyzing interviews with 37 young people in Australia using Irwin and Michael's account of science-society relations and Warner's conceptualization of "publics," we explore the processes by which they assess the credibility of online sexual health information. We suggest that when seeking medical information, young people opt for traditionally authoritative o…
Re)reading the political conflict over HIV in South Africa (1999–2008)
Re)reading the political conflict over HIV in South Africa (1999–2008)
New narratives, new selves
Within the expansive qualitative literature on alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, knowledge of lived experiences of AOD addiction is limited. Much of the existing scholarship reifies addiction as a calamitous state, and pathologises those believed to be experiencing it. Such research discounts the many ways people live with regular AOD use and is unable to tell us much about how addiction emerges through, rather than precedes, people’s experiences…
Claiming rights, making citizens
Producing alcohol and other drugs as a policy ‘problem’
Rethinking the Poverty-disease Nexus
Challenging the addiction/health binary with assemblage thinking
Iterating ‘addiction’
Addiction stigma and the biopolitics of liberal modernity
Telling different stories, making new realities
Diffracting addicting binaries
Associated with social and individual harm, loss of control and destructive behaviour, addiction is widely considered to be a major social problem. Most models of addiction, including the influential disease model, rely on the volition/compulsion binary, conceptualising addiction as a disorder of compulsion. In order to interrogate this prevailing view, this article draws on qualitative data from interviews with people who describe themselves as …
Problematising LGBTIQ drug use, governing sexuality and gender
Matters of fact and politics
Drugs as technologies of the self
Data-driven intimacy
22, 243-257]', we explore how sexual practices, intimacy and pleasure become 'datafied' through these sensory technologies. Inspired by the concept of the 'sexuality-assemblage', we pose teledildonic-enhanced sex as a 'sexuotechnical-assemblage', a term that highlights the uniquely technological dimensions of sex in the age of teledildonics. Approaching these devices as sexuotechnical-assemblages highlights the generative role of data as lubrican…
Testing and Diagnosis as Social Interventions
Kiran Pienaar (KP) and Alan Petersen (AP): Thank you, Annemarie, for agreeing to share your perspectives in this interview. We are delighted to have this opportunity to engage with your insights and scholarly contributions on the sociology of diagnosis. In 2011 you co-edited a special issue of Social Science and Medicine entitled ‘Toward a Sociology of Diagnosis’ in which you called for sociologists to pay more attention to medical diagnosis as a…
The Molecular Turn, Predictive Technologies and Diagnostic Fragmentation
Alan Petersen (AP) and Kiran Pienaar (KP): Thank you, David, for agreeing to share your perspectives in this interview. It is a pleasure and honour to have this opportunity to engage with your insights and scholarly contributions on surveillance medicine and the sociology of diagnosis. Looking back to your early contributions on surveillance medicine, these seem to anticipate recent diagnostic trends. What, if anything, has changed in the interim…
Testing for Life? Regimes of Governance in Diagnosis and Screening
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Enacting ‘more-than-human’ care
The "Be All and End All"? Young People, Online Sexual Health Information, Science and Skepticism
In this article, we investigate young people's trust in online sexual health resources. Analyzing interviews with 37 young people in Australia using Irwin and Michael's account of science-society relations and Warner's conceptualization of "publics," we explore the processes by which they assess the credibility of online sexual health information. We suggest that when seeking medical information, young people opt for traditionally authoritative o…
Managing risks or generating uncertainties? Ambiguous ontologies of testing in Australian healthcare
Medical testing promises to establish certainty by providing a definitive assessment of risk or diagnosis. But can those who rely on tests to offer advice or make clinical decisions be assured of this certainty? This article examines how Australian health professionals, namely clinicians, microbiologists, specialist physicians and health policymakers, delineate the boundary between certainty and uncertainty in their accounts of medical testing. A…
Making publics in a pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed sexual relationships into sharp focus as strict containment measures, including physical distancing and 'stay at home' restrictions, were initiated to control the spread of the virus. Governments in some jurisdictions prevented contact between non-cohabiting sexual partners (except for couples in pre-existing relationships), while community organisations recommended people avoid casual sexual encounters. This arti…
Basic care as exceptional care
The discrimination faced by people understood to have alcohol or other drug addictions has been the subject of extensive research, with many studies documenting experiences of stigma within healthcare services. Building on this literature, we examine the role of stigma in shaping the healthcare expectations of people seen as affected by alcohol and other drug addictions. Our analysis draws on recent theorisations of stigma as a process of social …
Searching for diagnostic certainty, governing risk
Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine's epistemic system: it serves to explain individual symptoms, classify them into recognizable conditions and determine their prognosis and treatment. Medical tests, or investigative procedures for detecting and monitoring disease, play a central role in diagnosis. While testing promises diagnostic certainty or a definitive risk assessment, it often produces uncertainties and new questions which call for yet furthe…
Injecting as a sexual practice
‘Slamsex’ has emerged in gay vernacular in recent years to denote a particular way of taking drugs and a particular kind of sex. Slamming refers in this context to the practice of injecting drugs – typically crystal methamphetamine – intravenously. To pair ‘slamming’ with ‘sex’ is to propose that a particular mode of drug administration is constitutive of a particular kind of sex – a relatively novel idea that deserves some unpacking. What does i…
Improving understandings of trauma and alcohol and other drug-related problems
Psychology (30 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Political science (28 obras) · Medicine (19 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Politics (13 obras) · Psychiatry (13 obras) · Epistemology (12 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras)