‘Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body’ was a seminar held as a satellite event on Monday 25 August 2025 alongside the Contemporary Drug Problems conference at the University of Manchester, coinciding with Manchester Pride. The seminar brought together three bodies of research – socio-legal studies, critical drugs studies, and movement studies – to explore what insights these different fields can offer one another, in terms of both research and practice.
Bringing socio-legal and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of drug issues is vital, particularly given the legal and social justice dimensions of drug-related problems. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has recently established a dedicated branch to manage the movement of drugs across international borders, sports anti-doping agencies increasingly find themselves caught into geo-political conflicts, and laws have increasingly expanded to regulate the use of drugs during and prior to sexual encounters.
Law regulates drugs and movement, often at the same time. This plays out in laws regulating bodies with drugs moving across international and sometimes sub-national borders; laws restricting the ways that bodies affected by drugs can move in diverse areas such as driving, sports, and sex; and laws controlling the movement of bodies with a history of drug use through things such as interlock devices, ankle bracelets, and custody cells.
Law often seeks to regulate the movement of bodies that are deemed unruly due to the use of drugs, and this can carry consequences for those who use them. It is notable that the legal regulation of drugs that escalated during the temperance movement also led to a prohibition of sound and dance forms, suggestive of connections between forms of music, drugs, and dance, such as alcohol and jazz, reggae and cannabis, raves and ecstasy, and so on. In contrast to movement, fixation is a common thematic in the legal regulation of dance, copyright, and choreography, as well as in drug regulation, taxonomy, and classification, suggesting confluences between fixation and legitimation as compared to unfixity and deviance.
Thinking through movement can also provoke new methods of conducting legal research into drugs issues, including arts-based methods such as dance. Arts-based methods of socio-legal research offer new ways of exploring the intersections of law, drugs, and moving bodies through lifting law from the page to the stage.
Schedule of presentations
| Welcome and opening matters | 10:30-11:00 |
| Session 1 | 11:00-12:30 |
| Presentation 1 | Alejandra Zuluaga, ‘Epistemic barriers in drug policy: A decolonial perspective on the interpretation and application of human rights’ |
| Presentation 2 | Esmé-Renée Audéoud, Justine Browne, Christie Chuprum, Angéline Martel, Monika Barbe-Welzel, Jorge Flores-Aranda, and Rossio Motta-Ochoa, ‘Indigenous unruly bodies: Managed Alcohol Programs, cultural adaptation and movement’ |
| Presentation 3 | Veera Kankainen, Anu Katainen, Katariina Warpenius, and Lotta Hautamäki, ‘Subject of rights in involuntary drug treatment: A critical policy analysis of Finnish law-reform discourses over the past 15 years’ |
| Lunch | 12:30-14:00 |
| Session 2 | 14:00-15:30 |
| Presentation 4 | Liam Michaud, ‘Police discretion and the relational economies of drug distribution: Rethinking “punitiveness” and “leniency” in street-level enforcement’ |
| Presentation 5 | Kate Seear, ‘An abecedarium of multispecies matterings’ |
| Presentation 6 | Vincent Gaillard, ‘The law and the chemsexed consent jigsaw: Dissecting the multiple facets of sexual consent between queer men in the context of chemsex’ |
| Afternoon Tea | 15:30-16:00 |
| Session 3 | 16:00-17:00 |
| Presentation 7 | Maria Federica Moscati, ‘Hormones, bodies, and movement’ |
| Presentation 8 | Sean Mulcahy, ‘Chemsex and the law – Exploring the legal borderlands and narco-frontiers in the justice system’s response to drug related sexual offences’ |
Forthcoming special issue/section
Following the seminar, the convenors will produce a special issue/section of Contemporary Drug Problems featuring pieces and works presented at or connected to the themes of the seminar.
Contact
For questions, email:
Dr Sean Mulcahy at s.mulcahy@latrobe.edu.au
Acknowledgments
This seminar was funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association.
