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Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, borrowed electronically through Libby/Edinburgh City Libraries.
Academic themes:
Pre crime:
Arrigo, Bruce, and Brian Sellers. 2021. The Pre-Crime Society: Crime, Culture and Control in the Ultramodern Age. Bristol, UNITED KINGDOM: Bristol University Press.
Emotions and the machine:
Collier, Ben, Richard Clayton, Alice Hutchings, and Daniel Thomas. 2021. ‘Cybercrime Is (Often) Boring: Infrastructure and Alienation in a Deviant Subculture’. The British Journal of Criminology (online early). doi: 10.1093/bjc/azab026.
Murch, W. Spencer, and Luke Clark. 2021. ‘Understanding the Slot Machine Zone’. Current Addiction Reports 8(2):214–24. doi: 10.1007/s40429-021-00371-x.
Disruptions to drug markets:
Dietze, Paul M., and Amy Peacock. 2020. ‘Illicit Drug Use and Harms in Australia in the Context of COVID-19 and Associated Restrictions: Anticipated Consequences and Initial Responses’. Drug and Alcohol Review 39(4):297–300. doi: 10.1111/dar.13079.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. 2020. COVID-19 and Drugs Drug Supply via Darknet Markets.
Nagelhout, Gera E., Karin Hummel, Moniek C. M. de Goeij, Hein de Vries, Eileen Kaner, and Paul Lemmens. 2017. ‘How Economic Recessions and Unemployment Affect Illegal Drug Use: A Systematic Realist Literature Review’. International Journal of Drug Policy 44:69–83. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.03.013.
The researcher’s kitbag should include several analytical heuristics you can apply to your case. These are not ready made pop up explanations. They are designed to aid thinking about why the social world looks and operates the way it does. This one is a version of Becker’s (1998) machine trick: ‘Design the machine that will produce the result your analysis indicates occurs routinely in the situation you have studied.’ It means working out what problem the institution, policy, device or system you are working with is solving. That is different from what it purports to be solving or what its designers intend.
Examples from technology design are good ones to start with as they embed solutions that might not always be articulated but are there. The Segway is a two wheeled self balancing electric personal mover. It began to be sold in 2001. It was notorious for the buildup to the launch during which fevered speculation about what it was and the impact it would have ran rampant. Without knowing exactly what it was people mused it would revolutionise urban life. The Segway itself was expensive and did not appear to solve any problem people actually had. It did not fit into any transport category or replace any existing transport device with something better. It was illegal and extremely anti social to use on pavements. It was slow and off putting to use in traffic.
We can apply the above trick to understanding it by defining the problem it actually addressed which was: very affluent urban dwellers walk too much. It would be better if they did not walk short distances and used this device instead. That was not a problem needing solved. We can then infer other effects of the Segway which would have come into being if it had taken off. We could call this the Uber stage. Uber sought like many other tech platforms to change transport regulations throughout the world in its favour. If Segway had followed the Uber path it would have spent vast amounts lobbying governments to allow its use in pavements, provide infrastructure to support it, and encouraged users to use it regardless of local rules. Then we would have a class of urban pavement users zipping along on their devices. Walking would become a highly stratified practice of those who cannot afford, use or refuse a Segway type device crammed into special lanes on the pavement while Segway users zipped past.
Some answers to the Becker question might sound a bit sarcastic, for example: the problem prisons solve is that criminals need places to pass on skills and drug dealers need a captive market. That’s just one of the answers though. There are many other problems prisons are solving which highlight the absence of effective institutions to do their job such as warehousing people with severe mental health and substance use problems. That should give us a few clues to the kinds of problems social institutions they could be solving, those they should be solving and those they are solving. My surmise is that it is effective to examine each institution or social phenomena as if it were a device, bringing us back to the machine trick. In my understanding the device is more like an assemblage in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, a skein of elements which are not necessarily logically coherent nor a unified whole, but which have powerful effects in the world. A drug trafficking network is a device in this sense, assembled from smartphones, dead drops, mules’ bodies, tourist towns and cheap airfares.
Summary of Becker’s tricks by Kathy Roulston: https://qualpage.com/2017/03/16/11-tricks-to-think-with-when-analyzing-data/
Becker, Howard S. Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you’re doing it. University of Chicago press, 2008.
Detailed ethnographic work (Bourgois 1998, Wakeman, 2015) has shown the rich, complex set of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities by which heroin users in marginal social and economic circumstances maintain a moral economy. The moral economy is instrumental and emotionally bound, locking users into norms of reciprocity and sharing, distributing resources and helping users limit withdrawal and also avoid some harms such as overdose. Punishment is also distributed, through excluding a norm violating individual from the community of care. These studies are in embedded communities, where people interact regularly. Micro payments and limited options mean people need to interact frequently, to maintain an income and to obtain heroin. A range of roles come into being such as the user-dealer and a range of practices such as instrumental social supply.
The moral economies described have qualities in common. Participants are known to each other and subject to some degree of mutual surveillance and influence. Interactions are recurrent and frequent, sometimes to the point of being ritualised. They take place in geographically well bounded and resource limited environments. There is a sense that this is why they exist: they are needed to combine different kinds of scarce resources into a working set of social and material relationships that rewards prosocial participants by protecting them against frequent periods of scarcity and withdrawal. Acute withdrawal can be used as an implied threat so as to push members into compliance. These characteristics are typical of a population of heroin users who are also likely to be frequently in contact with criminal justice, social and other services.
Shewan and Dalgarno (2005) highlight the existence of another group of non-treatment users who are more like the general population in terms of employment and education. Participants indicated that their drug use was typically controlled and did not dominate their day to day lives. Users did not centre their lives around heroin buying and consumption. They were peripheral to many aspects of the moral economy described above. It appears that this more individuated group of users do not need the moral economy to get by. Population data note a decline of face to face drug purchase during the pandemic and a further rise in the popularity of social media apps for obtaining drugs. It is likely that these changes further marginalise the moral economy and push users towards the cash nexus. I hypothesis that people who buy using cash, consume individually or with their own friendship group and not with the people they have bought from. Face to face buying might be a useful proxy for engagement in the moral economy. On the other hand, Masson and I noted that varying degrees of reciprocity were possible in darknet drug markets.
Bourgois, Philippe. 1998. ‘The Moral Economies of Homeless Heroin Addicts: Confronting Ethnography, HIV Risk, and Everyday Violence in San Francisco Shooting Encampments’. Substance Use & Misuse 33(11):2323–51. doi: 10.3109/10826089809056260.
Wakeman, Stephen. 2016. ‘The Moral Economy of Heroin in “Austerity Britain”’. Critical Criminology 24(3):363–77. doi: 10.1007/s10612-015-9312-5.
Shewan, D., P. Dalgarno, A. Marshall, E. Lowe, M. Campbell, S. Nicholson, G. Reith, V. Mclafferty, and K. Thomson. 1998. ‘Patterns of Heroin Use among a Non-Treatment Sample in Glasgow (Scotland)’. Addiction Research6(3):215–34. doi: 10.3109/16066359808993304.
I want to supplement some of the advice given to PhD students about their supervision team. There are a lot of guides for PhD students on ‘choosing your supervisor’. Advice falls into the following categories: topic expertise, position in the field, and personality/working style. Do they know their stuff, do they know the ropes, and can you work productively together. It reflects the different elements of good PhD supervision. The supervisor should open up pathways for you, guide you towards productive modes of work and away from easy mistakes and mentor you in a more holistic sense. It’s a sweet combination. Not everyone is going to cover all of these elements which is why we have two supervisors.
That assumes students are going to be in a position to choose their supervisor. I am here to tell you that choices are limited and mostly students do not go shopping for supervisors in the way suggested. Sometimes supervisors come tied to a project. Some supervisors only take on specific project types. There is not as much shopping around as implied and maybe there does not need to be.
I ask if you can choose your supervisor because it’s not very likely you will know those elements in advance. You will only know if you can work with them if you have already worked with them. In which case you have still not chosen them, happy happenstance has done the work for you. Paying attention to their position in the field is also self defeating. Someone who is so well known will have many potential PhDs wanting to work with them and might be the one doing the choosing.
When I am arranging supervision the biggest obstacle is that many academics cannot take on more PhDs. I don’t agree with the view that there is a supervisory type. Each relationship is unique and we adopt different roles depending on the needs of the project and the student. What does matter is that you are all able to reflect honestly about working patterns as you go along. Coming to know one’s supervisor is a process of coming to know yourself: their and your inspiration places, blindspots, comfort zones. That is why it is productive to think about what the PhD needs alongside what it is.
