Managing the uncertainty posed by people who use drugs: Conditionality of care/irreversibility of punishment in post-Soviet Russia
Venue
Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building, The University of Edinburgh , Edinburgh EH8 9LDDescription
The presentation aims to discuss how welfare infrastructures established in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods sought to manage the uncertainty posed by people who use drugs—less by “treating” drug use than by expelling, isolating, and administratively disqualifying those associated with it. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow in 2013–2014, it follows a connected institutional landscape through which exclusion is reproduced as routine governance. Across hospitals, shelters, and police encounters, these people are repeatedly treated as administratively “out of place”: too undocumented to qualify for care, yet sufficiently legible to be subjected to surveillance, fines, detention, and coerced cooperation. The infrastructure does not eliminate uncertainty so much as reproduce it and relocate it onto the person—making these people simultaneously expellable and permanently governable.
Key speakers
- Alexandra Dmitrieva