Beyond moralising,disciplining and normalising discourses: Re-thinking geographies of alcohol,drinking,drunkenness

Abstract

Despite significant advances over the past few decades, geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness remain under-theorised and researched. Indeed, even when applying critical thinking, geographers have tended to unreflexively reproduce, rather than question ‘alcohol studies’ ontologies and epistemologies infused with moralising, disciplining, and normalising discourses. In response, we present three intertwined research trajectories, informed by broader human geography debates, which offer opportunities to engage with alcohol, drinking, drunkenness more carefully and critically through; relational, flat, and decolonising ontologies; de-determination and intensities of (non)human relations; and ethical and political imperatives of research that ask questions of ‘worth’ and ‘reason’. Specifically, this involves, firstly, reinvigorating theoretical challenges to dominant and long-entrenched political, policy, popular, and academic debates; secondly, pursuing focused empirical accounts of heterogeneous and complex knowledges, practices, materialities, emotions, embodiment, affective experiences, and performances; and thirdly, paying attention to topographies, qualities, forms, and intensities of relational time/spaces beyond alcohol consumption per se. Our conclusion reflects on the challenges and opportunities of re-thinking geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness within and beyond the discipline.

Introduction

The past few decades have seen significant progress in theorising and researching geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. ¹ From pioneering work focused on (in)temperance to recent interest in materialities, assemblages of (non)human actors, emotions, embodiment, and affect, geographers have explored diverse political-economic, policy, legislative, policing, health, and socio-cultural spatialities (for reviews; see Jayne and Valentine, 2016b; Jayne et al., 2008a, 2011a). As well as highlighting the importance of disciplinary perspective to interdisciplinary ‘alcohol studies’, geographers have been working to shape political, policy and popular debates (e.g. see Herrick, 2013; Jayne et al., 2016; Valentine et al., 2008, 2010b; a 2008 special edition of the interdisciplinary journal Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy; and Consumption Controversies: Alcohol Policy in the UK published by the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers in 2010). Although the point of departure for this paper is to build on these interventions, we do so by acknowledging and seeking to overcome situated knowledge production complexes that underpin research and writing. In response, we signpost exciting and innovative research trajectories offering indicative new, but not exhaustive, opportunities to radically re-think ontologies and epistemologies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness.

Critical thinkers at the vanguard of geographers’ engagement with alcohol, drinking, drunkenness paid attention to; public, domestic, and commercial spaces; mental health; families and young people (Bromley and Nelson, 2002; Burns et al., 2002; Dorn, 1983, 1999; Kneale, 1999, 2001; Lowe et al., 1993). Against this backdrop of burgeoning interest, a key milestone was political, policy, and popular debates regarding liberalisation, legislative de-regulation, policy, and policing in the UK during the mid-2000s. In response, geographical studies focused on re-imagining of production, marketing, retail, and consumption cultures; interrogating social inclusion/exclusion and ‘moral panics’ regarding drunken and disorderly cities (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Hubbard, 2005; Jayne et al., 2006, 2008b; Latham, 2003; Talbot, 2007).

Around that time, our review of ‘alcohol studies’ across medical, health, and social sciences suggests that ‘lab-based experimentation, statistical measurement, modelling, and numerical representations … dominate … newspaper headlines, popular imaginations, representations and influence political decision-making and policy strategies’, and that ‘pathologising of alcohol … remains entrenched because the majority of social scientists engaged in ‘alcohol studies’ have failed to critique dominant ontologies and epistemologies’ (Jayne et al., 2008a: 246). Justification for this argument was founded on ‘an impasse where alcohol consumption is viewed as a medical/health, social, legislative, crime, policy problem or embedded in social and cultural relations’ (Jayne et al., 2008a: 247), where on the one hand researchers unpack discursive and differential construction of ‘problematic drinking’ (Ettore, 1997; Thom, 1999); or on the other hand explore socio-cultural relations of ‘constructive drinking’ (Douglas, 1987). Dialogue between these opposed viewpoints, during that period, was limited to consideration of, for example, conflicts and trade-offs between legal and ‘common-sense’ definitions of drunkenness (e.g. Levi and Valverde, 2001; Valverde, 2003). Our review also suggested that ‘space and place are mainly addressed as passive backdrops … [and that] [l]ocation, context and the relationships between the people and places tends to be considered as a peripheral issue’ (Jayne et al., 2008a: 262). We also acknowledged that geographers could similarly be criticised for limited attention to ‘case studies of specific people and places’ and highlighted the need to make ‘connections between different people, places, practices, and processes, addressing similarities, differences and mobilities at different spatial scales’ concluding that:

it is important that geographers begin to unpack … the different ways that alcohol, drinking and drunkenness are viewed, classified, considered and researched. This includes the need to think through the different use and meanings of terms, how these emerge from different concept-formations; to ask how and why general and specific research questions are being pursued. In simple terms, human geographers must engage with underlying assumptions and approaches and begin to address the epistemological and ontological contradictions, impasses and conflicts that constitute alcohol studies … such an agenda is vital if human geographers are to add value to current research and contribute in significant ways to research, knowledge and debates (Jayne et al., 2008a: 262–263).

From the late 2000s, geographers have been working extensively to respond, explicitly or implicitly, to such critical reflection, and/or by offering other pertinent critiques and in doing so have generated detailed, and rigorous theoretical, methodological and empirical work, with ontologies and epistemologies from Europe and North America now also been applied to Southern contexts too. ² It is our contention nonetheless that, even when pursuing critical perspectives, geographers have yet to fully engage with ‘underlying assumptions and approaches’ that underpin situated political, policy, popular, and academic knowledges (Jayne et al., 2008a: 262). Thus, whilst disciplinary progress can be celebrated, problematic ‘alcohol studies’ thinking continues to echo across critical geographical accounts because researchers unreflexively adopt a priori ‘assumptions’, ‘expressions’, ‘facts’, and situated knowledges. In sum, there has been a failure to explicitly interrogate just how alcohol is bound up with specific practices, performances, and actions of (non)human actors. This gifts ‘causality’ and/or ‘agency’ to alcohol as a ‘catalyst’, ‘accelerator’ or ‘root cause’ of ‘problematic’ and/or ‘constructive’ drinking – particularly with regards to depictions of violence and disorder, health and social problems, social exclusion, and sociability/conviviality – without sustained and convincing critical theoretical reflection or empirical examination. Indeed, reading across geographical studies it is remarkable that there is still relatively little focused attention paid to alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. Studies, at best, offer un-substantiated or -evidenced connections between alcohol and topics at hand; and at worst, alcohol, drinking, drinking, drunkenness are depicted in peripheral or unspecific ways.

This does not mean, however, that we believe research by geographers is worthless and facilitated no scholarly progress – absolutely not! Instead, our central concern is to celebrate the sophistication, rigor, and novelty of theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches that have added significant iterative value to our understanding of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. However, in this paper, we ask legitimate and careful questions that recognise the limits of current scholarship, and in responses, we begin to explore the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ of work needed to overcome moralising, disciplining, and normalising discourses. In doing, we suggest the following directions for research.

Firstly, we foreground the importance of revisiting and advancing theoretical work that challenges dominant and long-entrenched political, policy, popular, and academic debates. More specifically, we contend that the raft of theoretical resources now being applied to study alcohol, drinking, drunkenness, are simply ‘written-over’ already existing ‘alcohol studies’ thinking rather than being fully exploited to ask new questions of familiar terrain. In order to elaborate on this point, secondly, we discuss the need for focused empirical accounts of heterogeneities and complexities of knowledges, practices, materialities, emotional, embodied, affective experiences, and performances. More specifically, by exploring questions of ‘causality’ we suggest that techniques of de-determination and attention to intensities of (non)human relations as just two examples of the ways vital new empirical research can be pursued. And, thirdly, we showcase the efficacy of studying topographies, qualities, forms, intensities of relational time/spaces beyond alcohol consumption per se. This imperative, may of course, appears counter-intuitive for geographers interested in alcohol, drinking, drunkenness; however, we make this case not only with regards to the intellectual benefits of relational thinking but do so with reference to ethical, political and policy possibilities too.

Our paper is predominantly founded on a review of geographical literature in order to stimulate open and critical debate which we hope will make a significant contribution to future philosophical, empirical, and methodological trajectories. However, we augment critical review by drawing on our recent experiences of undertaking research in China (Jayne et al., 2021, 2022; Liu and Jayne, 2022). Despite historical and contemporary geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness in China markedly contrasting with dominant situated knowledge from Europe and North America, there are also similarities, connectivities, and mobilities too. Indeed, working in this context offered insights into the stubborn influences of disciplining, moralising, and normalising discourses on our own research by disrupting foundational ‘alcohol studies’ ontologies and epistemologies relating to ‘regulatory frameworks’, ‘surveillance medicine’, ‘self-governance’, and social, cultural, and moral opprobrium generated by research in Europe and North America. As such, the considered and critical thinking enabled by considering research design, fieldwork, and publishing experiences from our study in China has offered vital resources to ‘reflect back’ (Ward, 2010) on the importance, challenges, and opportunities of re-thinking geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness no matter where in the world research is undertaken.

Re-thinking geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness

Alongside the critiques outlined above, our 2008 review acknowledged the importance of a number of intersecting theoretical debates that continue to inspire critical geographical work (Jayne et al., 2008a). Firstly, social constructivist approaches drawing on political–economic (neo-Marxist); feminist and post-colonial theories, initially focused on ‘night-time economies’, have since been applied to an increasingly diverse range of topics. Secondly, geographers have been inspired by work to de-centre medical/scientific models of alcohol consumption such as Thom's (1999: 131) book Dealing with Drink: Alcohol and Social Policy from Treatment to Management. Thom's Foucauldian critique of ‘scientific evidence’, quantitative surveys, and epidemiological data highlighted the efficacy of challenging how politicians, policy-makers, service providers, and a majority of ‘alcohol studies’ researchers have bought into ‘guestimates’ used ‘for international, national, and regional comparisons and the ways in which such knowledges are used to lay foundations for the development of services supplied by organisations and individuals who defined [and study] the problem’. Thirdly, a handful of geographers have drawn on Law and Singleton's (2003) attention to actor networks involved in the diagnosis and treatment of cirrhosis by tracing scientific and cultural knowledges that ‘make’ alcohol into different ‘things’. Focusing on the work of consultants, general practitioners, social workers, and experiences of patients in diverse institutional and everyday times/spaces, Law and Singleton offer insights into how treatment of ‘problem drinking’ involves heterogeneous knowledges, expertise, and performances in hospital, doctors’ surgeries, domestic spaces, pubs, on the street, in the media, within and between individual bodies, etc. Fourthly, an increasing body of writing has drawn on ‘assemblage thinking’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Latour, 2005) to explore (non)human actors and networks, practices and times/spaces, not as static arrangement, or a set of parts, either organised in a logical way or randomly collected, but by considering processes of arranging, organising, and fitting together. These insights have been applied to the study of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness alongside more-than-representational attention to emotions, embodiment, and affect (Davidson et al., 2005; Kenworthy-Teather, 1999).

For example, geographers now draw on diverse critical social constructivist thinking in order to explore: historical and moral geographies of policy, policing, regulation and licensing (Beckingham, 2008, 2019; Kneale, 2012; Kneale and French, 2008; Nicholls and Kneale, 2015); structural and ideological dimensions of the ‘alcohol industry’ (Herrick, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016); home, domestic, and relational geographies of public/private lives (Beckingham, 2021; Holloway et al., 2008, 2009; Jayne et al., 2021; Kneale, 2021; Liu and Jayne, 2022); identities and subjectivities including masculinity, femininity, ethnicity, and religion (Fileborn, 2016; Gillen, 2015; Holloway et al., 2009; Waitt et al., 2011; Wilkinson and Wilkinson, 2020). Other important topics include alcohol and tourism (Bell, 2008; Jayne et al., 2012); childhood, family life, and intergenerational relations (Jayne and Valentine, 2016c; Valentine et al., 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2013); young people, urban, and rural life (Leyshon, 2005, 2008; Maye et al., 2005; Valentine et al., 2009; Wilkinson, 2018; Wilkinson and Wilkinson, 2020); and ‘alcohol-related’ violence ‘at home’ and in public spaces (Brickell, 2008; Sandberg and Tollefsen, 2010; Trell et al., 2014). Researchers have also focused on spaces of ‘addiction’ and ‘recovery’ (DeVerteuil and Wilton, 2008; Evans et al., 2015; Whiteford et al., 2015; Wilton and DeVerteuil, 2006); and service-users’ identities and networks (Evans, 2012; Jayne, 2021; Jayne and Williams, 2020; Jayne et al., 2019; Mills, 2017). A handful of papers have also pointed to the challenges of ethnographic fieldwork and researching alcohol as a ‘sensitive’ topic (Gillen, 2015; Lawhon et al., 2013; Shin and Yang, 2020).

In parallel, geographers have also engaged with materialist, post-structuralist, and more-than-representational theories. For example, Latham and McCormack (2004: 716–717) critiqued notions that alcohol is an ‘independent agent’ highlighting lived-material realities and bodily, affectual and non-human assemblages that combine to produce ‘psychoactive socialites’. In response, numerous publications have explored spatialities and temporalities of bodies, emotions and affect relating to social mixing, conviviality, sociability, exclusion, and inclusion. (Jayne et al., 2010; Leyshon, 2005; Ural, 2017; Waitt and Clement, 2016; Waitt and De Jong, 2014; Waitt et al., 2011; Wilkinson, 2015); discussed ‘units’ as a bio-social-financial measure that determines the cost of health insurance and as a dominant measure in alcohol policy and practice (Jayne et al., 2011b; Kneale and French, 2015); and considered ‘drunken’ (im)obilities (Jayne et al., 2012; Wilkinson, 2018). Other studies have focused on assemblages (Bøhling, 2015; Shaw, 2014; Wilkinson, 2018); flows, friction, and socio-material metabolisation of alcohol (Lawhon, 2013) and offered new theoretical perspective on ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder (Jayne and Valentine, 2016a).

However, while such critical thinking has been highly productive it is nonetheless important to question how theoretical resources have been applied. Indeed, it is not unfair to suggest that criticisms (e.g. Jayne et al., 2008a; Latham, 2003) levelled at political–economic (neo-Marxist) accounts of the mid-2000s as homogenising and over-generalising connections between restructuring of the night-time economy and ‘new’ forms of social mixing, exclusion, violence, and disorder can now similarly be levelled at ‘social-cultural’ writing that emerged to rectify such limited depictions. For example, it is possible to argue that the application of social constructivist thinking to a diverse range of topics, case studies, and social groups has been premised on an ‘oversimplified’ exploration of masculinities, femininity, ethnicity; intergenerationality, childhood and ‘youth’; ‘addiction’ and ‘recovery’. More specifically, over the past few decades, studies have failed to account for complexities of ‘subjectivities-in-formation’ and modes of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ that constitute how people shape dynamics of political–economic, policy, health, and social–cultural relations bound up with alcohol, drinking, drunkenness, in and through, their daily lives (Ettlinger, 2020; MacLeavey et al., 2021).

In a similar vein, looking closely at responses to Latham and McCormack (2004) call for geographers to take ‘machinic assemblages’ seriously shows that studies have tended to marginalise geographies of the personal, mask emotional subjectivity, eclipse corporality, intersubjectivity, and politics of position and have offered little focused empirical evidence of materialities and (non)human relations. For example, Shaw (2014) and Bøhling's (2015) study of diverse (non)human actors in the ‘night-time economy’ (although admittedly for both these authors alcohol per se was not their central concern); and Lawhon (2013) political–ecology inspired account of flows, friction, and socio-material metabolisation of alcohol, highlight significant limitations in how critical theory has been applied to studying alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. This argument can also be levelled at studies of emotions, embodiment, and affect that also sideline focused attention to alcohol, drinking, drunkenness (Jayne et al., 2010; Leyshon, 2005; Ural, 2017; Waitt and Clement, 2016; Waitt and De Jong, 2014; Wilkinson, 2015 – this will be returned to later).

In sum, a characteristic of materialist, post-structural, and more-than-representational approaches is a failure to fully exploit the opportunities offered by these resources to ask new questions of familiar terrain. Despite the theoretical novelty, research remains dominated by a priori assumptions, rather than sustained and convincing critical reflection or empirical examination. This problem is not limited to the topic at hand, however. For example, exploring geographical engagement with ‘environmental issues’, Castree (2003) highlights political, policy, and intellectual impasses engendered by problematic nature/society dualisms mirroring our own arguments regarding geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. Similarly pertinent is the understanding gleaned by Castree's (2003) use of a quote by Doreen Massey suggesting that dualistic notions of ‘society’ and ‘nature’ have been ‘… severely detrimental to subsequent thinking and has left us with a legacy which is now a real mindbender to try and overcome’ (Massey, 1999a: 62; cited in Castree, 2003: 203). Indeed, reflecting on the profound ways that popular, political, and academic thinking is dominated by dualisms and impasses Castree asserts that despite fertile rethinking of ontology and politics across the social sciences many human geographers find it hard to think ‘out of the box’.

More specifically, Castree (2003) suggests that in ‘unmasking’ dominant scientific and popular ‘truths’, exposing cognitive and political ‘performativities’ of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideas, geographers remain overly influenced by ‘constitutive fictions’ via attention to diverse actors and organisations who believe that ‘society’ and ‘nature’ are (or should be) two different orders of reality. In essence, geographic work is reliant on pre-existing knowledges, ‘expressions’, and ‘facts’ about/of nature and even when human geographers are making strategic attempts to challenge society-nature thinking as a means of subverting those ideas, Castree (2003) argues this approach is ensuring that society–environment dualisms continue to exert a stubborn influence. In response, Castree highlights opportunities afforded by relational thinking and sympathetic blending of theoretical approaches, ‘shorn of both the traditional Marxian distinctions between the ideal and the real and the neo-Kantianism of post-structuralism … [as] arguably what non-dualist ontologies are all about’ (Castree, 2003: 204).

In the remainder of this section, we further explore Castree's (2003) insights by focusing on ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder with regards to questions of ‘causality’. For example, numerous studies, in the UK, have suggested ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder can be attributed to epochal urban change and capitalist restructuring, liberalisation, and de-regulation of legislation, policy, and policing. Alongside the emergence of ‘new’ venues and post-industrial socio-cultural relations and identities, it is argued that a disjuncture with ‘the past’ has left young people seeking to ‘make sense of their place in the world’ and in response were ‘hitting out’ (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Hobbs et al., 2003; Winlow and Hall, 2006). Mirroring this approach, Brickell (2008) discusses ‘alcohol-related’ domestic violence in Cambodia, linking structural political–economic shifts to everyday gendered relations. Undertaking ethnographic research responding to public health surveys showing domestic violence has persistently increased in scope and intensity following Pol Pot's regime, Brickell (2008) suggests subsequent shifts from armed-conflict to peace; political authoritarianism to liberal democracy; socialism to market-driven capitalist growth, are key to understanding ‘alcohol-related’ violence ‘at home’.

Unlike studies from the UK that do not question the link between alcohol and violence Brickell (2008: 1668) engages, albeit briefly, with ‘causality’ by signposting sociological, psychological, and scientific studies, conceding that ‘alcohol consumption in isolation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause to explain violent behaviour’. Indeed, a footnote suggests ‘alcohol-related’ violence relates to incidences where violence is ‘reported’ to have involved one or more participants who have been drinking but that the term does not imply a direct causal relationship between alcohol and violence’ (Brickell, 2008: 1674). However, despite these assertions Brickell (2008: 1668) points to suggestions that social scientists are ‘frightened’ by causation, and that alcohol-related behaviour ‘is as culpable to criticism than any other causal factor of aggression’. Despite signposting these ontological and epistemological challenges, Brickell (2008) nonetheless sidesteps critical or meaningful intervention, ultimately implicitly accepting ‘causality’ underpinned by data from public health surveys, and unquestioningly presenting ethnographic evidence limited to respondents’ narration of personal experiences of violence and ‘socio-cultural discourses’ of unequal power relations. The paper does not offer critical interrogation of how alcohol is constitutive of gendered violence through methodologically pertinent research.

A parallel critique can be made of Lawhon (2013) attention to flows, frictions, and socio-material metabolisation of alcohol, via the lens of Marxist political–ecology. Teased out from a study that engages with alcohol as constitutive of urban ‘disaster’, ‘structural violence’, and multiple harms and inequalities, requiring multidimensional governance responses, the key tenant of the broader research was to explore how alcohol consumption is discursively constructed as ‘root cause’ of social disintegration, crime, endemic unemployment, poverty, non-communicable disease, murder, rape, drug addiction, poor mental health, and chronic/acute illness and violence and disorder (e.g. Herrick and Charman, 2013; Herrick and Parnell, 2014). Lawhon (2013: 689) nonetheless tantalisingly points to the importance of paying attention to conditional relationality … suggesting ‘causality is complex, and the relationship between alcohol and other socio-material hybrids and relations is best understood as conditional’. Despite this statement, there is little empirical evidence or insights that fleshes out this theoretical claim. Indeed, despite applying thinking on metabolism and circulation, frictions, and flows to a diverse range of topics, the analysis of data yields remarkably similar results to mainstream ‘alcohol studies’ depictions of alcohol as: ‘social lubricant’; as a constitutive factor in creating noisy neighborhoods; by considering alcohol purchases and household income; and through discussion of hangovers and absenteeism; arguments, disagreements, and belligerence.

There is, thus, a noticeable mismatch between the innovative theoretical framing and research design and methodology, because ‘questions about flows and frictions were not explicitly asked’ … [but instead] … questions were asked regarding the lived experience of alcohol, including positive and negative impacts and strategies to reduce alcohol-related harm’ (Lawhon, 2013: 689–690). That the research design only focused on ‘problematic/constructive’ drinking binaries is telling. Moreover, despite Lawhon's (2013: 681) claim to provide empirical detail regarding ‘microscale impacts of socio-materiality on the body and the community’, the data from in-depth interviews and focus groups are dominated by ‘social narratives’ of ‘problematic/constructive’ drinking, which have only limited capacities to capture lived-realities. In this regards, it is also surprising that the review of academic literature only focuses on ‘[g]eographies of alcohol’ (Lawhon, 2013: 685) and fails to engage also with ‘drinking and drunkenness’. As such, when read together these limitations weakens the authors’ ability to convincingly explore alcohol (or drinking, drunkenness) as a ‘socio-material hybrid’.

These studies from Cambodia and South Africa are a pertinent example of how strategic attempts to highlight knowledges and performances of ‘problematic/constructive’ drinking ensues that associated moralising, disciplining, and normalising discourses exert a stubborn influence. ³ Such comments notwithstanding while critique is insightful, this contention also begs questions of how things can be done more critically and carefully. However, as we now go onto to show, despite our own efforts to offer critical insights into alcohol-related violence and disorder, by highlighting complexities enabled by a ‘mix-and-match’ of the theoretical resources, there are significant challenges in accounting for ‘causality’ in a manner that moves beyond normalising discourses. Such ongoing work is nonetheless vital to challenge the widely conceived view that violence and disorder are ‘natural’ or inevitable consequences of alcohol consumption (Jayne and Valentine, 2016a).

Firstly, Foucauldian and actor-network thinking is necessary to unpack how policy, policing and national statistics overstate levels of, and links between, alcohol consumption, violence, and disorder. It is essential, for example, that geographers critique definitions, measurements, and data-collection strategies and unpack how ‘definitive’ evidence of the ‘cost’ of alcohol in terms of policing, social harm, and health care, are discursively constructed and utilised by diverse actors and organisations. Secondly, it is imperative that geographers engage with the contested debates relating to ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder across medical, health, and social sciences debates. For example, psychological studies focused on micro-moments of violence through ethnography and laboratory studies of anxiety, alienation, and stress, exploring ‘proness’ to aggression, venues, and frustration, have highlighted that dominant theories of disinhibition, expectancy, and indirect cause are over-simplifications. In a similar vein, studies undertaken in laboratories have noted difficulties in assigning simultaneous and contradictory biological, physiological, and neurological effects of alcohol and that controlled laboratory conditions ensure the vast array of human and (non)human actors’ that influence people's drinking experiences cannot be accounted for. And, finally, piecing together critical social constructivist approaches, materialist and more-than-representational work highlights complex and heterogeneous narratives, experiences, and performance of; masculinity and femininity, classed, racist, homophobic, embodied, and subcultural abuse and how ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder might unfold where ‘mood’ or ‘rules’ are broken; or a response to ‘cheating’ or ‘disrespectful’ behaviour (e.g. when queuing at the bar, toilets, and taxies); and as a ‘heroic’ response to others’ ‘cheating’ or violent behaviour. Other critical perspectives have suggested that alcohol can be understood as Foucauldian ‘technology of the self’ and that violence/disorder can emerge though ‘intensities of atmosphere’ and ‘phases or pools of affect’ (see Jayne and Valentine, 2016a).

Although such explorations of ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder may differ from those noted above due to a lack of empirical research, the more important point of departure is to highlight the complexity of thinking needed to fully engage with the topic at hand. This offers new fruitful avenues beyond a search for ‘causality’ or ‘root causes’, underpinned by constitutive fictions (Castree, 2003) that suggest violence/disorder can be understood as simply being ‘down to the drink’. These insights nonetheless also point to the complexities of blending theoretical insights, and empirical evidence, in order to overcome dominant ‘causal’ theorisation, statistical depiction, and everyday knowledges and experiences that when read together constitute normalising ‘knowledges’ and ‘facts’ (Castree, 2003).

So where does this argument take us? How can we respond to the contention that, despite rich and diverse critical thinking, long-standing impasses and orthodoxies remain a ‘mindbender to try and overcome’ with geographers often failing to fully grasp opportunities to ‘think outside the box’ (Massey, 1999a: 62; cited in Castree, 2003: 203)? Subsequent sections respond to these questions through reflections on how to better account for the complexities of alcohol, drinking drunkenness through empirical research and more specifically the academic, ethical, political, and policy possibilities of looking beyond alcohol consumption per se.

Researching geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness

Alongside critical and creative ontological thinking, it is vital that attention is paid to research design and methodology which accounts for:

[e]ntanglements of neurobiology, embodied affect, materialities and ‘the social’ [whilst] accepting epistemological plurality and ontological contamination can also be risky in a scientific world where demands for theoretical and conceptual purity are high and disciplinary borders carefully patrolled. But if the reward is a broader biosocial understanding … it is worth taking (Soderstrom, 2019: 88)

However, as Latham and McCormack (2004) highlight psychotropic effects/affects of alcohol are difficult to capture, or as Harrison (2000: 557) suggests, this agenda bumps up against the ‘vexing task of description and vocabulary that can often fall short, and that language fails to account for the manifold affective events and textures it seeks to speak up for’. Despite such challenges, as we have noted elsewhere there is a clear need for future studies to purse a mix of methods, both:

quantitative, qualitative and to explore the potential for using brain scanners, the rating of sensations and intoxication, breathalyzer test, psychological questionnaires to consider people's drinking practices in different spaces and places at different time, in combination with ethnographic and ‘performative’ methods is clearly an attractive possibility’. While there may be ethical, practical and technological reasons why scientific work cannot better account for social settings and interactions, it is important that significant thought is applied to this problem of scientific ‘truth’ claims (Jayne et al., 2011b: 840).

As well as exploring new methodological approaches and combinations, it is vital that ‘risk’ and ‘rewards’ of challenging a priori moralising, disciplining, and normalising thinking are at the forefront of researchers’ minds. In order to elaborate on how this might play out during fieldwork it is useful to reflect on the empirical content of recent theoretically innovative studies and while there are numerous papers to choose from, here we discuss ethnographies from Australia.

Focused on ‘the weekend’, Waitt and De Jong (2014) seek to explain how alcohol shapes, transforms, and mediates ‘time’ as an embodied, mindful, and spatial phenomenon connecting bodies, objects, and spaces via respondents’ narratives of pleasure, disgust, pain etc. In-depth interviews, participant observations, biographies, and photo-elicitation interrogated topics including ‘growing up’, being ‘out and about … after dark’, and the importance of social media (Waitt and De Jong, 2014). The paper reports fascinating empirical findings, mirroring staple terrain for ‘alcohol studies’: friendship and togetherness; work-related stress; classed, gendered, ageist discourses and experiences; ‘pre-drinking’, house, and dinner parties; responsibilities of being a designated driver’; and other (im)mobilities and temporalities. In a similar vein, Waitt and Clement's (2016: 1128) use of ‘assemblage’ thinking seeks to contribute to; ‘decentring of medical, criminal and moralistic models’ emphasising the ‘role of alcohol … in making and remaking of rural places and gendered bodies by paying attention to both material and expressive forces’. Empirical insights, which again mirror findings of ‘alcohol studies’, highlight discursive and performed construction of ‘proper’ country femininity; embodied geographies of ‘motherhood’ and ‘older age’; friendship networks; drinking at home (in contrast to male-centred pubs and public cultures); intergenerational and familial transmission of drinking cultures, etc.

Despite feminist, materialist, and post-structuralist theories being critically and robustly foregrounded, both studies nonetheless fail to fully exploit their opportunities. For example, suggested new insights into how ‘bodily experiences are triggered by the bio-chemical and psychological responses to alcohol’ are not evidenced, and there is only passing mention, rather than sustained interrogation, of just how ‘sensations, moods and emotions evoked by drinking places’ are mutually constituted (Waitt and De Jong, 2014: 124). Indeed, tantalising references made by respondents are presented in a way that the reader is assumed to understand with regards to being ‘really drunk’, or ‘really, really drunk’ and other empirical evidence including: ‘Yeah, I like drink a whole bottle of wine before we go’, ‘I really like it’, ‘I feel a lot more relaxed’, and ‘pleasures of how drinking to excess’ provides sensuous information to dissolve bodily boundaries of femininity by doing ‘stupid’ things’ (Waitt and De Jong, 2014: 128–130). Similarly, despite the focus on assemblages that point to ‘a politics of intoxication’ contingent on embodied experiences, identities, and non-human materialities (e.g. lighting, drinks, seating and music) and some brief depictions of ‘guilt’ of hangovers, the complexities of such (non) human relations are frustratingly glossed-over (Waitt and Clement, 2016: 1128).

These limitations are not unique to these specific studies and similar critique can be applied to other cognate work (Bøhling, 2015; Jayne et al., 2010; Leyshon, 2005; Shaw, 2014; Ural, 2017; Waitt et al., 2011; Wilkinson, 2018, 2015). However, what is clear is that mirroring our critique regarding studies of ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder, recent materialist, post-structuralist, and more-than-representational accounts rely on a priori assumptions, ‘expressions’ and ‘facts’, rather than fully interrogating, just how alcohol ‘shapes’, ‘transforms’, and ‘mediates’ materialities, bodies, emotions, and affective atmospheres. In response, in the remainder of this section, we offer some thoughts on how this impasse can be addressed.

Methodological, empirical, and analytical challenges that emerged during our research in China are productive towards this exploratory dialogue. Indeed, it became clear during fieldwork, and later whilst coding and analysing data, that our own research design and methodological strategies were infused by moralising, disciplining, and normalising discourses. For example, despite revising interview and participant observation schedules in response to insights gained during piloting of our research, and after accounting for difficulties of language translation, tensions regarding our own a priori assumptions and situated knowledges came to the fore in a number of different ways. As Thrift (2009: 129) suggests research in China offers significant opportunities to challenge Euro-American-centrism, whilst noting, that in order to understand how space and place are materialised, imagined, performed, and experienced, it is vital that researchers’ ‘countenance not only that other peoples’ thought differently but that this thinking might make a difference’. In sum, it was obvious we were not ‘asking the right questions’ of ourselves and respondents in order to fully overcome the stubborn influence of ‘truths’ that travelled with us from our previous research in the Global North.

Firstly, the majority of respondents in our study struggled to answer in detail, or to reflect on, questions about how much/often they drank alcohol. Respondents had no impulse to reflexively ‘add up’ how much they drank on a specific night, or over longer periods because they did not consider themselves to have clearly defined or structured ‘habitual’ drinking patterns. Moreover, during in-depth interviews, almost a third of the 30 young people who took part in our study suggested they did not drink alcohol. However, with researchers following interview schedules for ‘non-drinkers’, it became evident that these ‘non-drinkers’ regularly consumed alcohol. Well-documented in studies from the Global North, it was nonetheless clear this was not ‘under-reporting’ (Stockwell et al., 2004). Instead, respondents were ‘defining and expressing’ times, spaces, and practices regarding ‘drinking-non-drinking’ that did not relate to whether alcohol was consumed. Secondly, participants un-reflexively ‘de-centred’ the importance of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness in specific times/spaces with regards to interactions with different social groups and resisted researchers ‘prompts’ to ‘focus on the topic at hand’. This tension highlighted how our questions were in fact ‘leading’ respondents to privilege alcohol above a range of diverse ‘other factors’ in their answers. Thirdly, what was clear in our research findings was that lack of sobriety was not straightforwardly aligned with classed, gendered, and aged power relations, or moral and ethical discourses relating to lack of self-control and decision-making, but instead simply understood as (un)predictable consequences of psychological, physiological, and biological effects of alcohol. Without a backdrop of pathologising, regulatory institutional and everyday influences of ‘surveillance medicine’ and associated ‘health indicators and measures’ to define forms of ‘self-regulation’ (Armstrong, 1995) respondents viewed alcohol, drinking, drunkenness via a diverse range of (non)human relational vectors beyond alcohol per se not explored in studies undertaken elsewhere in the world (this will be returned to later).

‘Reflecting back’ (Ward, 2010) on how these research experiences demanded ontological and epistemological responses which challenge moralising, discipling, and normalising discourses led us to the following observations. Asking respondents about amounts and patterns of alcohol consumption is not value-free because the individual or collective responses to these questions tend to be read against local, regional, national, and international statistical data sets, with conclusions, then made regarding consumption amounts/patterns above or below ‘recommended levels’ of ‘sensible/harmful’ drinking. Even if such comparison is only presented as ‘context’ against which more critical reflections on a diverse range of topics are elaborated, reference to problematic and flawed ‘proxy’ measures underpinned by ‘units’ of alcohol consumed nonetheless has a stubborn, even if often implicit, influence (see Jayne et al., 2011b; Thom, 1999). Alternative approaches could instead include jettisoning altogether such ‘counting’ and references to epidemiological ‘scientific evidence’, and instead researchers can formulate research questions that gather more sophisticated understandings of the quantitative and qualitative ways people ‘measure’ their drinking practices and experiences, thus generating insights to inform policy, political, and academic debate. In a similar vein, the problem of research design that ‘leads’ respondents to foreground alcohol in a way that eclipses all other threads of empirical evidence can be addressed through critical and reflexive research design and methodology.

Towards that goal, it is useful to turn to wider debates in human geography, which highlight strategies that with hindsight would have been productive in working to overcome our own situated knowledges when undertaking fieldwork in China. More specifically, we highlight two theoretical and empirical approaches that we think are pertinent antidotes to moralising, disciplining, normalising, and thinking – strategies of de-determination and attention to intensities of (non)human relations – which respondents in our study were to some degree doing themselves.

Building on terrain discussed by Castree (2003), Ash (2020) points to the efficacy of relational ontologies which ‘link’ disparate things, in order to show how they create and produce all manner of geographical phenomena. More specifically, Ash (2020: 346) summarises philosophical discussions amongst geographers who espouse a-more-or-less flat ontological approach:

as a way of differentiating between entities through a process of what can be termed de-determination, where the beginning and ending of an entity's qualities can be identified … differences between entities can be accounted for without reducing these differences to the product of a particular set of relations, or by returning to essentialist or binary modes of thinking

The concept of de-determination is useful for the study of geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness by working to avoid oversimplified searches for ‘root’ or ‘constellations’ of causality and instead challenges researchers to pay attention to ‘where any entity changes as it is connected to, or passes through, a set of relations with other entities that demands a topological view of space’ (Ash, 2020: 347). In these terms, de-determination can be applied to the challenges of better accounting for diverse and complex arrays of (non)human actors including, for example:

individual and collective emotional and embodied experiences of different types of alcohol consumption at different times and in different places and spaces and how they are affected by, and may affect a range of different relations, including embodied identities (e.g. age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.), emotional and embodied state (e.g. hunger, thirst, sadness, excitement, etc.), varying neurological responses to alcohol, social mixing, personal interaction, atmosphere (how sounds, smells, etc. affect the transpersonal circulation of moods and feelings), non-human materialities e.g. the taste and viscosity of different drinks and drinks containers (glasses, bottles etc.), and the physical layout of different commercial venues or public spaces (e.g. opportunities to sit, stand, move, dance, availability of toilet facilities, the proximity of other bodies, etc.) (Jayne et al., 2010: 548–9)

De-determination offers a pertinent way for researchers to begin to sidestep a priori ‘assumptions’ and ‘truths’, though specific and focused research questions. More specifically, de-determination can unravel the relational importance of alcohol and drinking and drunkenness as ‘entities’, pursued by focusing on changing ‘textures’, and ‘forms’ that constitute complexities of biological, physiological, psychological, and emotional, embodied, affective and material temporalities/spatialities as they unfold in relation to the vast ‘array of vectors of relationality’ amongst (non)human actors (Hopkins and Noble, 2009: 815).

In a similar vein, we believe there are significant opportunities in paying close attention to ‘modes of power and their intensities (how the effects of power come to form and are present/absent) and forms (how power relations are arranged into specific shapes or patterns)’ (Anderson, 2017: 501–502). This approach demands collection of empirical evidence that avoids viewing alcohol, drinking, drunkenness as:

centered or decentered … [but instead questioning] how relations and effects come to from as part of experience. Processes of coming to form … happening in the midst of diversity of things and forces that make experience more than simply an effect of power … [and which] occur with different intensities and involve different modalities of presence and absence (Anderson, 2017: 509)

These insights offer new avenues for critical interrogation of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness in a manner ‘not tainted by a kind of romanticism’ of either dualistic ‘problematic/constructive’ drinking or to ‘presume a distinction between subject and object’; but by paying attention to complexities of ideological and discursive contexts; narratives, discourses, and heterogeneity of knowledges, practices, performances, and ‘geographies of experience … that disclose how power operates, but without a priori assuming how power relations are ordered, patterned or shaped’ (Anderson, 2017: 502–506).

In simple terms, there are significant opportunities to explore how alcohol ‘shapes’, ‘transforms’, and ‘mediates’ (non)human relations, materialities, bodies, emotions, and affective atmospheres, in a manner that interrogates, rather than eclipsing the complexities and intensities of those relations, and in doing so challenge limited mindsets which underpin oversimplified attributions of ‘causality’ and/or ‘agency’ to alcohol. As such, alongside the diverse raft of critical thinking available, it is vital that geographers seize the opportunities offered by developing new innovative and creative methodological strategies to look again at how we ask questions of longstanding topics. This includes, for example, ‘drunken comportment’ (McAndrew and Edgerton, 1969) and a whole range of stubborn dualisms relating to ‘problematic/constructive’ drinking; including, drunk/sober; drunk/hungover; harmful/safe; binge/sensible; addiction/recovery; the effects/affects of alcohol/non-alcoholic drinks; public/private drinking; friendship/strangerhood; pain/pleasure; guilt-shame/pride; and dis-comfort/comfort. It is important, however, not to discount the significant challenges of matching the complexities of theoretical work required to better understand alcohol, drinking, drunkenness alongside the empirical difficulties of teasing out evidence of, for example, de-determination and intensities of (non)human relations.

We now turn to offer initial suggestions towards this project via empirical examples from China that look beyond alcohol consumption per se, and in doing so offer reflections on the political and ethical possibilities of such work.

Relational geographies beyond alcohol consumption per se

Relational geographies that look beyond alcohol consumption might appear counter intuitive when studying alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. However, we believe that this approach offers fruitful opportunities to provide a fuller, richer, and more detailed understanding of how alcohol, drinking, drunkenness constitute people's lives. For example, despite the problems noted above, empirical evidence generated by in-depth interviews and participant observation in China demanded attention to relational comparison. This included making connections between alcohol, drinking, drunkenness and visits to massage venues and tea drinking; and young peoples’ embarrassment of older people embodied, emotional, affective, and sensory ‘occupation’ and ‘monopolising’ of public spaces whilst dancing (Jayne et al., 2021, 2022). Analysis of data highlighted the importance of relational times/spaces beyond alcohol consumption per se enabled by ‘thinking through elsewhere’ (Robinson, 2016; Ward, 2010); which generated ‘questions, stretch[ing] and challeng[ing] understandings … [and in doing so enabled] difference-making as a tool to produce critical forms of knowledge in a heterogeneous urban world’ (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016: 2418).

The relatively small number of geographic studies that have applied ‘alcohol studies’ ontologies and epistemologies in China have focused on ‘binge drinking’, theft, sexual assault and health as well as paying attention to the role of alcohol consumption in (re)producing social relations, enabling conviviality and reciprocity in workplace, family, and research contexts (for a detailed review, see Jayne et al., 2022). Our research nonetheless highlighted evidence that contrasted with ‘moral panic’, ‘risky behaviour’, violence, and disorder and/or conviviality, sociability, and celebratory ‘rites of passage’ to adulthood associated with studies from the global North. Instead, ambivalence towards strangers, avoidance of social mixing, and sensitivity to integrational socio-spatial relations are key to understanding how and why young people in China perform identity, selfhood, and friendship in vibrant and busy public spaces. ⁴ This evidence explicitly foregrounds ‘intensification of power in particular sites, scenes, or bodies … saturation of power across multiple fields of experience … [relating to] presencing and absencing (Anderson, 2017: 503). Similarly, our study was replete with examples of young people's explicit de-determination of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness in different times/spaces that are ‘connected to, or passes through, a set of relations with other entities [and times/spaces] that demands a topological view of space’ (Ash, 2020: 347). This work of de-determination and attunement to intensities of (non)human relations was, for example, explicitly present in respondents’ accounts of informality, fun, and friendship at KTV, BBQ, and ‘quiet bars’ via direct relational comparison with social mixing in ‘western style’ bars and formalities of work and familial banquets (Jayne et al., 2021).

Our study also highlighted new terrain for geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness with regards to certain forms of action relating to embodied, emotional, and materialities of everyday financial lives (Jayne et al., 2022). In particular, empirical evidence highlighted intensities of (non)human relations bound up with intergenerational transmission of a diverse range of financial practices and subjectivities. These included: help to buy property; contributions to marriage ceremonies; funding expensive overseas higher education; employment opportunities enabled by family networks; childcare from older family members when young people entered employment; and young peoples’ responsibilities to care for (and live with) family members in their older age. However, reflecting on how these financialisations are performed, (re)produced, and (re)asserted through moments intensified by alcohol, drinking, drunkenness and familial ‘toasting’ at banquets, respondents assigned a relative importance to alcohol, drinking, drunkenness with regards to the ‘beginning and ending of an entity's qualities’, and other relational vectors that constitute intensities of financial and familial relations (Jayne et al., 2022). Indeed, clearly present in the empirical evidence was that respondents were identifying intensities of relational (non)human relations alongside strategies of de-determination to elaborate complexities of how alcohol, drinking, drunkenness constitutes their everyday lives. In sum, our research in China focused on a diverse range of public, commercial and domestic spaces that do not just relate to alcohol consumer per se but instead demanded engagement with ‘a host of relationships and relational interconnections … that configure and are configured by the everyday’ (Hall, 2019: 770).

Moving beyond a straightforward ‘like-for-like’ study of context, practice, and process (Ward, 2010) can thus help to refigure and add-value to a critical understanding of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness by discussing ‘drinking-non-drinking’ spaces/places, social groups, knowledges, imaginaries, practices, performances, and experiences. For example, earlier in this paper, we were critical of the work of Shaw (2014) and Bøhling (2015) for sidelining focused attention to alcohol, drinking, drunkenness in their application of assemblage thinking to diverse (non)human actors constituting the ‘nocturnal city’ including, bars and nightclubs; illegal drug taking; dancing; street lighting; streetcleaners; and taxi-drivers. That said, Shaw (2014) and Bøhling (2015) work nonetheless offers tantalising glimpses of the efficacy of combining their attention to geographies beyond alcohol in the ‘night-time economy’, with a focused relational comparative study of topographies, qualities, forms, and intensities of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness across other diverse and heterogeneous times/spaces.

This argument can be productively further elaborated with reference to recent debates regarding shifts in alcohol politics and policy from ‘management’ back to ‘abstinence’ across the global North (Jones et al., 2011; Monaghan and Yeomans, 2016; Whitehead et al., 2011). On the one hand, it has been argued that changes in politics and policy have (re)valorised abstinence-based ‘recovery agendas’ and ‘treatment regimes’ defined by notions of ‘vulnerability’, responsibilisation and ‘underclass’ behavioural politics. Indeed, Monaghan and Yeomans (2016: 124) suggest that despite no significant change in ‘evidence’, population-level public health initiatives previously promoting ‘sensible drinking’ and reduced consumption have been replaced by increasing emphasis on abstinence, and that such thinking has collided with ‘underclass and behavioural politics’ underpinning welfare and criminal justice reform. ⁵ In contrast, however, parallel studies have nonetheless challenged such depictions of monolithic hegemonic politics, policies, and public health programmes as over-simplification of the ways in which ‘vulnerability’ and responsibilisation, which seek to govern ‘irrational’ behaviours and decision-making, play out in everyday times/spaces of welfare and health care (Jones et al., 2011; Whitehead et al., 2011).

In order to overcome this impasse, some researchers have begun to discuss political and policy landscapes and ‘formal’ spaces of treatment with regards to relational attention to diverse ‘everyday’ spaces of recovery and the wide range of actors and organisations now part of alcohol recovery through a focus on social infrastructures of care and reciprocity – e.g. cafes, drop-in-centres churches, temples, and parks (Evans, 2012; Mills, 2017). Taking a different tact, other studies have considered policy landscapes, treatment regimes, and everyday lives of service users by paying attention to personal, family, and intimate geographies and temporalities (see Jayne, 2021). Such relational geographies can be further advanced by research questions that focus on de-determination and intensities of (non)human relations bound up with the ways in which a ‘medical gaze’ is cast over ‘practices and institutions spread across a diversity of sites … [along with] different centers of medical learning’ (Philo, 2000: 16); and to Law and Singleton's (2003) approach which uses actor-network theory to charts how alcohol is ‘made into different things’ amongst diverse social groups and times/spaces of alcohol policy and treatment.

Indeed, we argue that if applied together these theoretical resources can offer new avenues to advance the understanding of geographies of politics, policy, and practice. For example, a systematic review, from 1949 onwards, highlights that in China there has been no national ‘alcohol policy’ and no minimum age for alcohol consumption, and while cursory health warnings are required on packaging, and alcohol recently featured in anti-drink driving and anti-corruption campaigns, alcohol has not featured in public health strategies or campaigns (Guo and Huang, 2015). This political, policy, legislative, and socio-cultural context offers significant opportunities to apply such critical epistemologies and ontologies. As such, given that alcohol is not central to politics and health policy, work that traces diverse and heterogenous scientific and cultural knowledges amongst politicians and policy makers as well as in health care settings, educational establishments, criminal justice agencies, social services, doctors’ surgeries, police stations is particularly important for understanding institutional responses to, and experiences of people with ‘alcohol’ problems (Law and Singleton, 2003). Indeed, in China, there is no history of political, policy, legislative (re)assembling of (non)human ‘alcohol’ relations through bio-politics and governmentality, for example, ‘surveillance medicine’ which has (re)drawn relationships between symptom, sign, and illness, which problematising ‘normality through observation of seemingly healthy populations via ‘health indicators and measures’ underpinning ‘self-regulation’ (Armstrong, 1995). As such, focus on intensities of relational (non)human relations alongside strategies of de-determination offer significant opportunities to elaborate complexities of how alcohol, drinking, drunkenness constitute politics, policy, and everyday lives. In particular, there is much to be gained from relational comparisons which focus on the inception, mobilities, formulation, and implementation of alcohol-related politics, policy, and public-health treatment regime's, within and across, national, regional, local, and urban spatial scales.

However, ‘experimental’ relational comparison is not without ‘risk’. For example, characteristic of peer reviews of our papers was that both referees and editors, at worst rejected, or at best questioned the validity of the ‘relational vectors’ evidenced by the empirical findings. More specifically, reviewers who identified themselves as not Chinese, and/or with no critical knowledge of China, generally expressed ‘cynicism’ regarding our empirical evidence and critical analysis. More specifically, some reviewers found it almost impossible to accept that ‘alcohol-related’ violence and disorder is not an important issue in Chinese cities, and/or questioning if we were somehow missing the importance of alcohol to young people's ‘rites of passage’ to adulthood; and/or understating or mis-reading issues of power. In contrast, reviewers who defined themselves as scholars of Chinese life and/or urban geography, rejected the idea that relational comparison between massage or tea drinking, or older people dancing in public space could tell us anything at all about young people and alcohol, drinking, drunkenness at all; and/or just stated that ‘unscientific’ ethnographies of familial life are not a topic deserving of scholarly attention.

These responses perfectly highlight how attempts to rethink geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness can bump up against ontological ‘fixity’ (Joronen and Hakli, 2017: 573) that tends to be a mandate to speak for ‘reality’ rather than as-a-way to explore/question ‘what really happens’; a failure to challenge universalising claims of ‘ordering ontology’ – of conditions, categories, forces, causes, ideas, identities, relation, and difference (see Olsender, 2019). In this case, troubling stubbornness of colonial thinking expressed as cynicism, incredulity, and disbelief by some reviewers, was exacerbated by Chinese geographical imaginations overly dominated by ‘empirical studies and econometrical modeling … [and qualitative approaches that lack] nuanced analysis and theoretical debates’ (Hu and Qian, 2017: 463). Such comments notwithstanding, asking new questions via relational studies beyond alcohol consumption per se highlights the importance of ‘participation in the process of revealing: in as much as we link the notion of the ontological to questioning the ways in which the world happens and reveals itself … [and] our comportment towards these events of revealing’ (Joronen and Hakli, 2017: 573). This approach has much to contribute to social science agendas that de-stabilise universalising ontologies and epistemologies (Chakrabarty, 2000; Connell, 2007; Edensor and Jayne, 2012; Robinson, 2016; Roy and Ong, 2011).

This final point we now turn to relates to the political and ethical imperatives of better accounting for the role of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness in peoples’ lives – a topic that has received relatively little attention from geographers. For example, only Lawhon et al. (2013) in arguing that alcohol consumption should be viewed as a ‘sensitive topic’ and Gillen's (2015: 15) suggestion that researchers should be mindful of unequal social relations, ‘putting people at risk who work against these’ when drinking alcohol during ethnographic fieldwork have touched on ethics. We agree, of course, that researchers must pay attention to unequal socio-spatial relations, alongside a recognition that human-actors are always ‘under the influence’ of (non)human ‘independent agents’ (Latham and McCormack, 2004: 716), including consumption (or not) of caffeine, sugar, food, and medication – ‘substances that changes our behaviour and attitudes’; and moreover respondents/researchers face an array of emotional, embodied, affective registers that similarly ‘change our behaviour and attitudes’ during fieldwork (Gillen, 2015: 15). Thus, while we fully support the spirit of Lawhon et al. (2013) and Gillen's (2015) observations, more sustained and detailed exploration of ethics and researchers’ positionality must be attended to in a way that avoids giving agency to alcohol in a manner that reinforces moralising, disciplining, and normalising discourses.

We can further advance this contention with reference to Barnett's (2012) challenge that geographers need to engage with ethical imperatives of ‘placing life’. Against a backdrop of ‘staking ethical claims on ontological assertions’, Barnett (2012) argues that geographers often close-down consideration of ‘problems of normativity’, a contention that usefully relates to our discussion of ‘causality’. More specifically, Barnett (2012) highlights difficulties in capturing the blurring of boundaries between forms of action and knowledge in ‘spaces of causality’. In response, Barnett (2012: 380) suggests fruitful avenues to attend ‘spaces of reasons’, and the ways in which ‘spatial configurations of practice unfold through the enactment of different normative modalities of action, and the ways in which these enactments draw on ordinary, everyday forms of rationality’. To that end, Barnett (2012: 381) points to the need to overcome dualisms that lead to a sharp separation between realms of ‘causality’ and ‘reasoned spontaneity’ by:

keeping open a space for understanding the ordinary ways in which norms, values and justifications are folded into and out of assemblages of spatial practice: for a situated actor faced with an ethical situation, no amount of causal understanding can stand as a practical reason for acting one way or another …

More specifically, Barnett (2012: 382) asserts that this approach is necessary to overcome the ways in which ‘actions, within a social field, are likely to be judged, as right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, proper or transgressive, correct or incorrect, just or unjust, appropriate or inappropriate, right or wrong etc.’ To put it another way, these insights contextualise how alcohol, drinking, drunkenness are stubbornly viewed in political, policy, popular, and academic debates through moralising, discipling, and normalising discourses.

The ways in which this argument offers new terrain for studying alcohol, drinking, drunkenness comes into sharper focus via Barnett's (2012) discussion of ‘politics of behaviour change’, prevalent in UK public policy, where spatial practices and imaginations are given considerable ‘causal power’. Barnett (2012) suggests debate around this issue revolves around a distinction between the presumed efficacy of behaviour change techniques and less obvious ethical implications. For example, Barnett (2012: 322) suggests, ‘nudging’ assumes that governments can shape everyday behaviours ‘by prompting people to reinterpret their actions and change their beliefs, habits, and feelings cognitively in order to challenge inbuilt, automatic systems which guide people's behaviour’. For Barnett (2012) ethical worry shaping, these debates follows in large part from the bifurcation between ‘rational’ and ‘automatic’ that underwrites social science research. Rather than perpetuating dichotomous thinking regarding autonomous reason and forces of conditioning, Barnett (2012: 320) points to an alternative focus on ‘perception and action, reflecting and doing, as going on alongside each other, arrayed horizontally as it were, rather than imagined as vertically mediated’.

However, relational challenges to ‘vertical’ imaginaries bound up with ‘nudging’ agendas and ‘truth claims’ of politicians, policy makers, and academics can be dangerous. For example, Prof. David Nutt – the UK Government's chief advisor on drugs policy was sacked in 2009 due to his criticisms that scientific findings were ignored in favour of political agendas’ when he described alcohol as a ‘remarkable drug … there is no question … it is a unique drug’. Suggesting ‘ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol’ and that ‘alcohol is more dangerous than heroin’, Nutt pointed out that horse riding was more dangerous than taking ecstasy – with horse riding leading to 10 deaths and 100 traffic accidents each year whist ecstasy accounted for around 30 deaths each year. By presenting data on the risks associated with alcohol and illegal drugs with reference to activities, such as horse riding, Prof. Nutt's dismissal was sealed by his relational ‘vertical/horizontal’ comparative insights into ‘risk’ (although see Jayne et al., 2011b, for a critique of the evidence used to make such claims). ⁶

Our experiences of the ‘risks’, via peer review, of relational thinking beyond alcohol consumption per se is a pertinent example of the political and ethical challenges relating to:

[b]ringing the ordinary dimensions of normativity back into view is not, then, a matter of getting your ontology right: it is just a matter of being able to keep in view the coincidences, conjunctures and sequencing of different aspects of action … [and in doing so pay attention to] analysis of plural geographies of worth. This would be a programme in which the coordination of actions in time and space was understood to operate through the negotiation between multiple practices of evaluation, justification and accountability. The emphasis on the routine aspects of practical judgement that one finds in the traditions of work reviewed here suggests that, at some fundamental level, the competencies of acting subjects are not only worth taking seriously, but they might also be perfectly adequate. (Barnett, 2012: 380)

Indeed, Barnett's (2012, 2014) political and ethical agenda can be usefully applied to relational geographies beyond alcohol consumption per se via potentialities to better capture complexities of alcohol in people's lives in a manner that is not reliant on ‘social narratives’ alone. As we have noted earlier, ‘serial reproduction’ of empirical findings across ‘alcohol studies’ is remarkably similar no matter what theoretical framings are applied. As such, strategies to overcome pitfalls of ‘staking ethical claims’ on limited ontological and epistemological assertions by drawing instead on a mix-and-match of diverse theoretical resources and by pursuing empirically innovative research design, asks new questions of ‘worth’ and reason’ and challenges ‘constitutive truths’ that underpin disciplining, moralising, and normalising thinking.

Conclusions

This paper is a celebration of the sophistication, rigor, and novelty of theoretical, methodological, and empirical work, which over the past few decades, has added significant iterative value to our understanding of geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. However, by asking, and offering responses to legitimate and careful questions that foreground the limits of current scholarship, we have outlined some tentative reflections regarding ‘rethinking’ work that needs to be done to overcome stubborn and long-standing situated knowledges and a priori assumptions. The scale of the challenge for critical thinking to influence the status quo of political, policy, and academic knowledge production cannot however be understated. Indeed, Castree's (2003) suggests that despite the emergence of radical ontological thinking geographers across the discipline often struggle to think ‘outside the box’. For example, our experiences of publishing research undertaken in China mirrors Slater's (2009: 306) depictions of stubborn resistance to critical gentrification thinking and a resultant ‘defensive wall’ erected around a topic or sets of academic ideas because:

classical theoretical perspectives … ‘dressed up’ in methodological sophistication and nuanced reasoning, have proved highly seductive to journalists seeking sound-bytes and neat statistics, and to … policy makers searching for a ‘reliable evidence base’ free from ‘anecdotes’ … [and convinced many researchers that] concerns of critical thinking are overblown

As such it is essential that ongoing research into alcohol, drinking, drunkenness respond to Slater's (2009: 306) assertion that in order to maintain the credibility of disciplinary perspectives, we all work to avoid sidelining ‘intellectual projects’, and perspectives which call into question ‘underlying structure of interests … [and guard against those who seek to censor] critical agendas that call for sturdier analytical, political and moral framework’. ⁷ Evoking the insights of Castree (2003) and Slater (2009) may at face value be read as a rather pessimistic end to what we believe is instead a set of forward-thinking reflections throughout this paper. However, our contention those geographers have under-theorised and researched alcohol, drinking, drunkenness demands critical dialogue, rather than defensive or dismissive responses that seek to silence the productive and open conversation.

Towards that goal, we have highlighted new directions for research inspired by relational, flat, and decolonising ontologies. More specifically, we have signposted how de-determination can enable interrogation of the ‘beginning-and-end’ of the vast array of (non)human actors that constituent alcohol and drinking and drunkenness; alongside the exploration of modalities of presence, absence, and intensities of those (non)human relations; as well as foregrounding the efficacy of studies which pursue relational comparisons beyond alcohol consumption per se. When read together these ontological and epistemological strategies respond to the ethical and political imperatives of asking questions of ‘worth’ and ‘reason’ that can go beyond limiting moralising, disciplining, and normalising discourses. These approaches can be applied to all topics currently of interest to geographers who study alcohol, drinking, drunkenness, as well as offering new fruitful avenues for critical reflection, for example, on research ethics and positionality; with regards to the importance of undertaking sustained research beyond the global North; and by pursuing comparative relational geographies that connect diverse and heterogeneous public, commercial, familial, domestic, work and leisure times/spaces and ‘drinking-non-drinking’ knowledges, practices, experiences, and performances. To that end, we hope that our critique, complimented by the indicative, but by no means exhaustive theoretical, methodological, and empirical avenues suggested in this paper will inspire new and exciting scholarship.