Output details

Transferable Skills and the Drug Dependent: A Journey Through the City of Glasgow

This single authored peer reviewed article explores the notion that drug workers and society should consider the potential of dependents’ skills in aiding their recovery. It therefore takes an alternative view of skills involved in opiate addiction, normally seen as a negative aspect of addiction. Hackett researches key skills through an artist-led research methodology that questions addicts and professionals who work in dependency, identifying the positive potential of the knowledge underlying injecting, drug dealing, making money and skills of negotiation. He redefines these skills as a knowledge of maths, bartering, counseling and medical skills that might be deployed beneficially. The paper also explores how such knowledge might become transferable and more widely beneficial.

Paulo Friere’s theories around the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ through ‘problem solving education’ and ‘dialogical’ discussion are applied. The discourse used by Suzanne Lacy in her public art works resonates with the research in considering the arts as a beneficial way of creating dialogue.

There are two significant aspects to the underpinning methodology: First, Hackett, in the role of artist as social researcher, follows the journey of the opiate dependent interviewing addicts, drug workers and social workers by making a film that places himself as protagonist at the centre of the experience while reflecting on the relationship of the environment and poverty to drug dependents and their skills, http://medialibrary.rgu.ac.uk/player?autostart=n&fullscreen=y&width=640&height=385&videoId=2327&quality=hi&captions=n

Secondly, he creates an approach to questionnaire, which allows the interviewee the space to draw responses and notate addiction patterns. The visual aspect of the questionnaire allowed an exploratory dialogical approach to data gathering that probes personal knowledge and experience and opens dialogue between drug workers and dependents.

Margaret Hannah, Deputy Director of Public Health, Fife council has invited Hackett to discuss this research in a CPD session for a working group looking at these issues in Scotland.