Rethinking Drugs
What is ReD?
ReD Rethinking Drugs is a growing network of students, scholars, artists, and members of the general public in Mexico and the UK exploring how and where drug education can be expanded beyond its traditional focus on individual health. The network seeks to spark more democratic, deliberative, and interdisciplinary engagements with the topic of drugs in all of its complexity. As the political philosopher Wendy Brown argues, "citizens cannot rule themselves…without understanding the powers and problems they are engaging in." ReD seeks to create spaces of learning that make it possible to understand the full range of "powers and problems" we engage when we encounter drugs. It seeks neither to convert participants into anti-drug warriors nor into pro-drug reformers. Rather, the network aims to create spaces of open-ended, collective learning that allow participants to interrogate and articulate their own ethico-political stances towards drugs, thereby proliferating the number of voices and questions that can inform current drug policy debates.
Groups
ReD: Homerton College (Active)
An interdisciplinary and international group of undergraduate and post-graduate students, based at
Homerton College, University of Cambridge who meet monthly to discuss readings and films related to drugs and to explore how the University's drug policies might be made more responsive to students' lived experience and needs.
ReD: Iberoamericana (January-June, 2025)
A group of undergraduate students in the
Communication Department of the Universidad Iberoamericana who spent a semester pursuing self-directed, transmedia research projects exploring drugs from a variety of different thematic perspectives and ethico-political positions.