A recent study discovers the methodological prospect of interdisciplinary research to develop collective rather than interpretive or reflective knowledge practices for the study of recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. 

The question that reports this analysis of knowledge practices is how researchers participate in knowledge production and the possibility of creating alternative interdisciplinary methods that connect experts to treatment services and service users in new ways. 

The first part traces and evaluates methodological arguments on research methods in academic, professional and treatment service settings. In so doing the role sociologists were considered to have played in engrossing qualitative, quantitative and deconstructive approaches for investigating recovery from addiction, and the strengths and constraints of empirical and critical research methodologies in answering to drug policy on recovery. 

The second part describes a research collaboration with the sociologists N. Vitellone and L. Theodoropoulou, the visual artist and filmmaker M. Manchot, and research participants′ from creative recovery services in Liverpool, the opportunities offered by the idea of recovery as a minor practice to reconfigure the role of specialists, techniques, and participants in new collaborative lines of inquiry were considered. 

Looking to observations of a set of cinema-based pilot workshops from 2019 and 2020 with people in recovery, the impacts and outcomes of an interdisciplinary methodology for facilitating a different way of thinking about recovery as a minor practice are also explained. 

In rethinking and reimagining recovery as a nominal technique, this article furnishes an outstanding interdisciplinary approach to recovery-oriented practice and policy.

Source:  International Journal of Drug Policy. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2022.103618.