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Workshops 2019-20

Cultures of Intoxication: Contextualising Alcohol & Drug Use, Past & Present

This conference will focus on the cultural meanings and contexts of alcohol and drug use, both past and present. It aims to assess how cultural norms and stereotypes around alcohol and drug use shape policies, practices, treatment and users’ experiences and behaviour. In particular, it seeks to consider how and why those of certain ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexuality and socio-economic background are deemed prone to excess while others are supposedly abstemious.

Date: 7-8 February 2020

Location: UCD Humanities Institute 

To register, please (opens in a new window)click here.

Please note, registration ends on 31 January 2020 and places are limited. For queries, please contact the organiser, Dr Alice Mauger: (opens in a new window)alice.mauger@ucd.ie

Cultures of Intoxication programme 2020

Papers will reflect on the following themes:

  • Defining “drinking culture” and “drug culture”
  • Attempts to change drinking/drug cultures
  • Ethnic, racial, gendered and socio-economic stereotypes/stigma of alcohol and drug use
  • Medical/policy/public perspectives on drug and alcohol use
  • Cultures of abstinence or excess
  • Hidden cultures, subcultures and countercultures
  • Culture-specific marketing and advertising
  • Alcohol and drugs tourism


Keynote Speakers:
Professor Geoffrey Hunt, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences - Centre for Alcohol
and Drug Research, Aarhus University
Dr Deborah Toner, School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester

Supported by the Wellcome Trust

Contact UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland

School of History, Room J113, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
T: +353 1 716 8185