Agency, sex and drug education: Examining the response-ability of education responses to consumption, sex and harm.

Abstract

This article examines how drug education professionals understand and respond to the relationship between alcohol and other drug consumption, sex and harm. While recent research examines how these issues are addressed in drug education curriculum, little is known about the perspectives of professionals involved in education design and delivery. Research suggests that agency is centrally important for understanding experiences of harmful, pleasurable or ambiguous sexual encounters in consumption settings. I analyse understandings of the relationship between agency, drug consumption, sex and harm generated during in-depth interviews with drug education professionals. Informed by Karen Barad's relational concepts of agency and response-ability, I examine the agencies that these professionals constitute as the locus of harms related to consumption and sex. Some focus on individual human agency, while others position alcohol and drugs as the primary agents of harm. Throughout the analysis I argue that both approaches offer an impoverished account of drug consumption and sex and inform education approaches that struggle to respond to other significant agencies such as gender. I also examine accounts that grapple with agencies beyond people and drugs. Overall, I argue for drug education approaches that are more response-able to the multiple agencies that together constitute experiences of drug consumption and sex.