‘Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body’ is a seminar held as a satellite event on Monday 25 August 2025 alongside the Contemporary Drug Problems conference at the University of Manchester, coinciding with Manchester Pride. The seminar brings together three bodies of research – socio-legal studies, critical drugs studies, and movement studies – to explore what insights these different fields can offer one another, in terms of both research and practice. It offers new ways of doing socio-legal research with attention to law’s relation to drugs and movement.

Bringing socio-legal and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of drug issues is vital, particularly given the legal and social justice dimensions of drug-related problems. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has recently established a dedicated branch to manage the movement of drugs across international borders, sports anti-doping agencies increasingly find themselves caught into geo-political conflicts, and laws have increasingly expanded to regulate the use of drugs during and prior to sexual encounters.

This seminar is particularly timely given the ways in which law regulates drugs and movement, often at the same time. This plays out in laws regulating bodies with drugs moving across international and sometimes sub-national borders; laws restricting the ways that bodies affected by drugs can move in diverse areas such as driving, sports, and sex; and laws controlling the movement of bodies with a history of drug use through things such as interlock devices, ankle bracelets, and custody cells.

Law often seeks to regulate the movement of bodies that are deemed unruly due to the use of drugs, and this can carry consequences for those who use them. It is notable that the legal regulation of drugs that escalated during the temperance movement also led to a prohibition of sound and dance forms, suggestive of connections between forms of music, drugs, and dance, such as alcohol and jazz, reggae and cannabis, raves and ecstasy, and so on. In contrast to movement, fixation is a common thematic in the legal regulation of dance, copyright, and choreography, as well as in drug regulation, taxonomy, and classification, suggesting confluences between fixation and legitimation as compared to unfixity and deviance.

The seminar will explore these socio-legal issues as well as methods of conducting legal research into drugs issues, including arts-based methods such as movement and dance. Arts-based methods of socio-legal research offer new ways of exploring the intersections of law, drugs, and moving bodies through lifting law from the page to the stage. This seminar will explore current legal and policy debates about the regulation of drugs and movement and offer findings generated through innovative research methods that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers.

Schedule

Welcome and opening matters	10:30-11:00
Session 1	11:00-12:30
Presentation 1	Alejandra Zuluaga, ‘Epistemic barriers in drug policy: A decolonial perspective on the interpretation and application of human rights’
Presentation 2	Esmé-Renée Audéoud, Justine Browne, Christie Chuprum, Angéline Martel, Monika Barbe-Welzel, Jorge Flores-Aranda, and Rossio Motta-Ochoa, ‘Indigenous unruly bodies: Managed Alcohol Programs, cultural adaptation and movement’
Presentation 3	Veera Kankainen, Anu Katainen, Katariina Warpenius, and Lotta Hautamäki, ‘Subject of rights in involuntary drug treatment: A critical policy analysis of Finnish law-reform discourses over the past 15 years’
Lunch	12:30-13:30
Session 2	13:30-15:00
Presentation 4	Liam Michaud, ‘Police discretion and the relational economies of drug distribution: Rethinking “punitiveness” and “leniency” in street-level enforcement’
Presentation 5	Kate Seear, ‘An abecedarium of multispecies matterings’
Presentation 6	Vincent Gaillard, ‘The law’s movements on the queer male body: Intoxicated consent in chemsex’
Afternoon Tea	15:00-15:30
Session 3	15:30-16:30
Presentation 7	Maria Federica Moscati, ‘Hormones, bodies, and movement’
Presentation 8	Sean Mulcahy, ‘Chemsex and the law – Exploring the legal borderlands and narco-frontiers in the justice system’s response to drug related sexual offences’
Farewell and closing matters	16:30-17:00

Notes for attendees

Whilst the seminar will be held alongside the Contemporary Drug Problems conference, the seminar is also open to non-conference attendees.

Contact

For questions, email:
Dr Sean Mulcahy at s.mulcahy@latrobe.edu.au

Acknowledgments

This seminar is funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association.