Drugs in motion : towards a materialist tracking of global mobilites

The basic approach begins from the ground up, describing the global circuits of production, distribution, and consumption of each substance, then moves on to examine wider social and cultural issues. This project recognizes the importance of tracking global processes through a focus on their material manifestations--that is, substances of various kinds whose history, use, and symbolism provide lenses through which global processes in cultural and economic life can be apprehended more clearly. At the same time, this project recognizes the need for a genuine interdisciplinarity in order to achieve this goal. Perhaps even more so than is the case with other substances and commodities that have historically furnished the foundations of global links and routes, the cultural economy of drugs lies at the edges and intersections of traditional disciplines: geography, history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, economics, pharmacology, among others.