THE PRODUCTION OF LIFE IN THE INVISIBLE WEBS OF FRIENDSHIP: a cartography in the field of drugs with young university students
Friendship; drugs; care; universitary youth
This cartographic intervention-research starts with the question: what can the ethical and political experimentation of friendship and support networks for the production of care practices and strategies among young university students who use multiple drugs? In this investigation, we proposed: a) produce and accompany a group device made up of young university students who use drugs; b) map ways of consumption, management of multiple drug use and self-care linked to the collectivization of experiences; c) identify shared care strategies from a harm reduction, mapping the production and strengthening of support and sociability networks that are articulated with an ethical and political experimentation in friendship. Interrogating the conception of friendship between people who use drugs as a “risk factor” - endorsed by prohibitionism - we are interested in experiences that announce their ethical, aesthetic and political powers that reveal the production of care, knowledge, life and living in its multiple forms of existence and expressivity. Along this path, we use group devices and cartographic interviews and, as a means of analysis, the cartographic diary (individual and collective), narratives written from the diaries and collective meetings. We present the analyzes in four hyphae: I) the drug device and the marks of coloniality in us and among us; II) the drug device at the university and clues for a decolonization of knowledge based on friendships; III) for an ethics and politics of friendship in the cultivation of non-fascist relationships and ways of life and IV) producing lives, building worlds. Finally, we conclude that friendly relationships produce webs of life, knowledge and care. Besides, these relationships appear threatening to conservative regimes by producing fields of collective experimentation of criticality around hegemony and the established and new creative perceptions of worlds.