"You have to love the party setting": an ethnography of the blurred lines between roles and experiential knowledge in a French harm reduction collective working in the party setting.

Abstract

Background: The party setting is a dynamic social environment where the world of drug use, the role of music, and a multiplicity of social interactions all converge, often marked by the disruption of social and temporal norms and rules. People who use drugs (PWUD) in the party setting are rarely targeted by institutional harm reduction (HR) interventions despite the many risks specific to this setting. InterCAARUD Festif Île-de-France (IFI) is a collective of French HR associations implementing interventions in the party setting for over a decade through coordinated teams of HR volunteers. We investigated the organization of the IFI collective with a view to acquiring a better understanding of the specific features that enable it to provide relevant HR interventions in the party setting.

Methods: We collected data over nine months using ethnographic methods (participant observations, photography, field notes and informal interviews), focus groups and semi-structured interviews. We analyzed these data using a thematic analysis.

Results: Three main themes emerged: (1) coordination of the IFI collective (2) horizontality between the collective's members (i.e., employees and volunteers) and between the nine collaborating HR associations comprising the collective, and (3) affinity between the collective's members and their commitment to HR. All three themes reflect one of the key features of the collective's organization in terms of implementing HR actions, specifically the blurring of roles between partygoers, the collective's employees and its volunteers. This role-blurring fosters the sharing of another key feature - experiential knowledge - at all levels in the collective's organization.

Conclusion: The IFI HR collective is characterized by coordination, horizontality, affinity, and the commitment of its members. Through the blurring of roles between all concerned stakeholders, experiential knowledge is welcomed and used to improve the adaptability and responsiveness of the collective's HR actions. All these elements enable the collective to carry out relevant HR actions in party settings, despite economic and organizational challenges.