Nicole Vitellone – författare

This book addresses the history of harm reduction. It evaluates the consequences and constraints, stakes and costs of the policy of needle exchange for the purposes of harm prevention and health research. Vitellone situates the syringe at the centre of empirical research and theoretical analysis, challenging existing accounts of drug injecting which treat the syringe as a dead device that simply facilitates social action between humans. Instead, this book complicates the relationship between human and object – injecting drug user and syringe – to ask what happens if we see the object as an intra-active part of the sociality that constitutes injecting practices. And what kinds of methods are required to generate a social science of the syringe that is able to measure injecting sociality?Social Science of the Syringe develops material methodologies and epistemologies of injecting drug use to enact the syringe as an object of intellectual inquiry. It draws on the methodologies of social anthropology, Actor-Network-Theory, Deleuze’s empiricism and new feminist materialism to move towards materially-engaged knowledge production. This interdisciplinary approach improves understandings of the causes and effects of injecting behaviour and the problem of needle sharing, as well as providing a more robust empirical framework to evaluate the motivations and consequences of drug use and drug policy. This book will appeal to researchers and students interested in the sociology of health and illness, STS, Actor-Network Theory, empirical sociology, medical anthropology, social and cultural anthropology, addiction theory and harm reduction.

Focusing on the US, British and Australian contexts, Object matters addresses the impact of the discourse of safer sex on our lives and in particular the lives of adolescents. Addressing AIDS public health campaigns, sex education policies, sex research on adolescence and debates on the eroticization of safer sex, the author looks at how the condom has affected our awareness of ourselves, of one another and our futures. In her examination of the condom in the late twentieth century, Vitellone critically engages with a range of literatures including those concerned with sexuality, adolescence, methods, gender and the body. This book will be of interest to sex educators, academics as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students working in the areas of Sociology, History, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.

Problematising Water: An Experiment on the Edges of Interdisciplinarity is a manifestation of thinking with water across a range of disciplines including human geography, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ethnomethodology.In this book, Vitellone reveals the alliances between Michel Foucault’s concept of problematisation and a new methodological approach for water- focused research, as seen through her study of London’s #OneLess refill water fountain pilot, an intervention to reduce plastic bottled water. Situating the refill water fountain as a problematic space for collaborating with marine scientists, marine conservationists, systems change practitioners, and publics engaged in the making and doing of refill, the book discusses how Foucault’s notion of problematisation forces a re- thinking of knowledge making practices in environmental research on water. It also synthesises a large body of literature by key thinkers, including Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Andrea Ballestero, Astrida Neimanis, Noortge Marres, Gay Hawkins, Andrew Barry, Mike Michael, and others, and links to current debates across a variety of disciplines.Problematising Water: An Experiment on the Edges of Interdisciplinarity is a timely and provocative contribution to debates around the climate crisis and environmental interventions and the role that different research methods and objects play within them. It will be of value to science and technology scholars, social scientists, natural scientists, and academics interested in the environmental humanities.