We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest paper from our drugs and human rights project, co-authored by GLaD research team members, Dr Sean Mulcahy and Prof Kate Seear, entitled ‘Imaging people who use drugs: How parliamentary actors picture and tell stories about the subjects of drug law reform’, and published in the journal Australasian Drama Studies.
The paper was first presented in London at the Applied Legal Storytelling Conference. Picking up on the theme of legal storytelling, the paper examines the use of storytelling and imaging practices by parliamentary actors in the context of undertaking parliamentary human rights scrutiny of alcohol and other drugs legislation.
As part of our project on drugs and human rights law, we conducted thirty in-depth, semi-structured interviews with members of parliament and parliamentary advisors. At one point, we asked our interviewees whether and how they pictured people who use drugs when undertaking scrutiny of drugs-related legislation. Through follow-up questions, we explored the images they created. In asking our interviewees to engage in what we term ‘reflective imaging’, we were seeking to tease out potentially conscious and unconscious elements of the law-making process, including how (and whether) parliamentary actors picture people who might be affected by the laws when they make them, from where these images are drawn, and what the various affects of such imaging practices might be.
We found that the practice of imaging sometimes provoked an emotional reaction that reminded parliamentary actors of their duty towards the communities they serve; other times, parliamentary actors were unable or unwilling to engage in reflective imaging, seeing it as being outside the law-making process and necessarily separate from the putatively dispassionate contours of the law-making and scrutiny process. As we concluded:
[The images] tell us, in this case, about who parliamentary actors see as the subjects of drug laws and the spaces in which they operate, with the images representing sometimes unconscious associations between drugs, people, problems and places. Parliamentary actors grapple with the images they have of people who use drugs, the emotions they generate, and the technocratic demands of the role.
The images (or the lack thereof) also drive the parliamentary actors’ approaches to law-making, reflecting how they conceptualise drug use, whether they view it as a ‘problem’ requiring legal intervention and, if so, what kinds of intervention.
Our paper also raises the question: how could these images change and how would changing images change the actor? That is, how could changing images shift the actor’s attitudes and positions on contested areas like drug regulation?
We suggest that the answer is twofold.
First, the reflective imaging exercise should perhaps not be premised on how the actor pictures the person who use drugs but rather how the actor pictures the person who uses drugs reacting to their work, as the practice of putting the actor in another’s shoes might generate more empathy for people who use drugs.
Second, drug law reform advocates need to generate images that can challenge stereotypical views of people who can use drugs, that can encourage parliamentary actors to think again, and that can provide a richer picture of drug use in contemporary society for the benefit of publics.
As we suggest in our conclusions, this reflective imaging method could be applied to explore parliamentary actors’ images of other objects and subjects of law reform in other contexts. We look forward to further explorations of how imaging can be used in research with parliamentary actors and welcome your feedback on this novel methodological technique of reflective imaging.