Understanding and addressing pleasure in harm reduction

This poster presents the planning stages of my PhD project. The proposed research will use a qualitative methodological approach to understand the role of ‘pleasure’ in participant’s experiences of injecting drug use and, through this, intends to inform more meaningful and engaging harm reduction strategies. The project will use: creative interviews with people who inject drugs (PWID), employing body-mapping and video elicitation techniques, to access the widely undocumented embodied and relational experience and practice of injecting drug use, with a particular interest in the role of pleasure; in-depth interviews with service users to ascertain their view on this role and its potential use in harm reduction; and participant observation at drug services to contextualise the interview data and understand how pleasure, if found to be of importance, could be realistically included in harm reduction. From previous research and my service user feedback, the proposed project expects to find pleasure to have an important role in people’s practices of injecting drugs, but what kind of role this plays and how it can inform harm reduction strategies remain key questions.