Chemical Youth

How can we understand the ways chemicals affect young bodies and minds? Instead of focusing on illegal drug use with the purpose of controlling it, we study the pervasive use of chemicals in everyday life – ethnographically, from the perspective of youth themselves. The project and the book situates chemical enhancement in terms of the challenges that young people face in managing a range of expectations and pressures.

The project reveals how young people view the risks of using chemical substances, confronting the uncertainty of the practice while also attending to the perceived benefits. The research team has conducted their research over the past few years by using ethnographic material from young people across the globe, including The Netherlands, USA, Indonesia and the Philippines. During the festive book launch, experts from different disciplines will shed their light on the different chapters in the book.

About the speakers

Anita Hardon is Professor of Anthropology of Care and Health and Director of the Research Priority Area Global Health at the University of Amsterdam.

Annemarie Mol is Professor Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of a range of articles and of the books The Body Multiple; The Logic of Care; and Eating in Theory; and she co-edited Differences in Medicine; Complexities; Care in Practice and On Other Terms. Currently, she is trying to finish the project Eating is an English Word; while she has already started the next one, Clean as a Good.

Reinout Wiers is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, he heads the Addiction Development and Psychopathology (ADAPT) research group. Wiers is internationally renowned for his research into measuring and influencing cognitive processes in addiction. He has published more than 300 scientific articles in this field, as well as some popular scientific books. Wiers is co-director of the UvA research priority area “urban mental health”.

Shanshan Lan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances”, which examines how the western notion of whiteness is dis-assembled and re-assembled in the new historical context of China’s rise as a global superpower.  She is the author of Diaspora and Class Consciousness: Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago (Routledge 2012), and Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging (Routledge 2017).

Marieke de Goede (moderator) is professor of politics, with a focus on ‘Europe in a Global Order,’ at the Department of Politics of the University of Amsterdam. Starting December 1st, she is also the Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research.