Core Publications

Sultan, A. (2022). Recovering Assemblages: Unfolding Sociomaterial Relations of Drug Use and Recovery. Palgrave Macmillan: Singapore.

Sultan, A., & Duff, C. (2022). The line of vulnerability in a recovery assemblage. International Journal of Drug Policy, 107.

Sultan, A. and Duff, C. (2021). Assembling and diversifying social contexts of recovery. International Journal of Drug Policy, 87 (January). 

Sultan, A. & Mažeikienė, N. (2021). Living with HIV in post-Soviet states: Rejecting individual stigma through social activism. International Social Work, 64 (3).

Sultan, A. & Andresen, S. (2019). ‘A child on drugs’: Conceptualising childhood experiences of agency and vulnerability. Global Studies of Childhood, 9 (3), 224–234.

Most recent

Sultan, A., Bühler-Niederberger, D., & Nasrullayeva, N. (forthcoming). Sociomaterial analysis of Azerbaijani children’s smartphone use. In Bühler-Niederberger, D., Gu, X., Schwittek, J., & Kim, E. (eds.), Childhood and youth in Asian societies – generations between local and global dynamics. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Sultan, A., & Rychert, M. (2022). Inaugural editorial: Reflecting on the past, envisioning the future. Drugs, Habits and Social Policy. 23(1), 1-4.

Hunner-Kreisel, C., Bühler-Niederberger, D., Sultan, A. (2022). Foundations of well-being in children’s and youth’s everyday lives in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. Child Indicators Research, 15 (4).  

Sultan, A. (2022). Aging with drug use: Theorizing intersectionally with material gerontology and critical drug studies. Journal of Aging Studies, 60. 

Sultan, A. (2022). What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ The Place and Wellbeing of Young People in Azerbaijan’s Drug Policy. Child Indicators Research, 15. 

Multiple marginalization of older adults with extra-medical drug use: A perspective of care (April 2020 – December 2020, Dr. Aysel Sultan, Minerva Center on Intersectionality in Aging, University of Haifa)

This proposal focuses on a branch of the new project designed by the Minerva Center on Intersectionality in Aging (MCIA) that among other commitments plans to investigate bridges between multiply marginalized older adults and mainstream society. The proposed project by Dr. Sultan commits to MCIA’s objectives and adds a novel approach by involving an array of theoretical and methodological commitments informed by STS and intersectionality. This includes exploration and integration of the concepts of age and aging, drug, and marginalization all framed from a material gerontological perspective. The aim is to approach marginalization in older age via exploring the use of pharmaceutical drugs for other than medically prescribed purposes. Remaining a conceptual research in its first stage, the project inquires the literature and emerging debates to ask following questions: Are older adults more likely to be marginalized for drug use?; Where are the gaps in research on ageing drug user cohorts?; What are the gaps in current care services for drug users in general and what are specifics for older adult population in need of such services? How does marginalization of older adults who use drugs intersect with age and their needs for care? The questions reveal in the initial stage a marginalization of drug use in older age as a topic of research itself. One way to look at extra-medical drug use and marginalization of older adults is through a prism of care. Examining the notion of care which informs our interventions, policies, and research ideas can be a beneficial start for developing the overall goals and future outcomes of this project. Within this proposal, the central STS reference on care is a Dutch ethnographer Annemarie Mol.  The theoretical underpinnings also involve central works of other STS scholars and empirical philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Isabelle Stengers, John Law, and material gerontologists such as Julia Twigg, Gavin Andrews, Stephen Katz, Paul Higgs and others.

By taking STS approach, the project hopes to find out methodological as well as theoretical ways of inquiring drugs as objects of enhanced or self-care, wherein healthcare needs that are specific to ageing populations intersect with the marginalization in the provision and addressing of these as such.

Recovering Assemblages: Unfolding social and material practices of drug recovery in youth (09/2014-06/2019, Dr. Aysel Sultan, Ministry of Education of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Faculty of Educational Sciences of Goethe University Frankfurt)

As recent developments in alcohol and other drug (AOD) policy and research continue challenging normative ideas around drug use and users, the concept of recovery finds an ever-growing ubiquity both on theoretical and practical sites. The interdisciplinary studies suggest that recovery is a contested area both for research and practice, while the definition of the concept remains unclear as policy-makers and researchers vigorously debate on what it means ‘to recover’ within a range of social, cultural, medical, and material perspectives. Drawing on the scarcity of research investigating the recovery needs of youth in different contexts, this research maps how recovery needs emerge in the daily lives of youth who have consumed illicit drugs for more than two years. It follows the multiple accounts of recovery to suggest a definition of the term after a thorough analysis of the various recovery contexts, forms of recovery, and assembling of different material, physical, and social capacities of youth living in Azerbaijan and Germany.

The project had a series of methodological commitments, enmeshing (1) a non-standard comparative design following Isabelle Stengers and other STS scholars in attending to multiplicities and dynamic contexts instead of national boundaries and cultural contexts, (2) placing specificities of being a young drug user and dependencies as well as choices relating to treatment, (3) and finally a materialist ontological framework informing relational, dynamic, socio-material practices and experiences of recovery. Three questions guided these perspectives: what entanglement of human and nonhuman actors make recovery possible, how youth make and re-make sense of their experiences, and can recovery be understood as an assemblage? The study argued for a contingent, arbitrary, and relational character of recovery that is not possible to define in any temporal or spatial manner. Moving away from linear explanation of recovery as a straight line from drug use through abstinence, the study instead defined recovery in an entanglement and existence with drug use. Through mobilizing a number of approaches such as ontological politics, assemblage thinking, and Actor-Network-Theory, the study analyzed recovery in four fluctuating forms. The results point that the future of drug treatment programs can potentially be subject to explorative changes if drug use and recovery are approached simultaneously. It is the idea of locating recovery inside the drug use, which could potentially render a closer investigation of bodily capacities, spatial properties, and relations as altogether galvanizing a certain habit.