Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body

By Kate Seear, Maria Federica Moscati, Sean Mulcahy, and Alejandra Zuluaga

Keywords: drugs, movement, dance, socio-legal studies

‘Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body’ was a seminar held as a satellite event on 25 August 2025 alongside the Contemporary Drug Problems Conference at the University of Manchester, coinciding with Manchester Pride. Pairing these events facilitated engagement with scholars from around the globe who were attending the conference.

The seminar brought together three bodies of research – socio-legal studies, critical drugs studies, and dance and movement studies – to explore what insights these different fields can offer one another, in terms of both research and practice.

Bringing socio-legal and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of drug issues is vital, particularly given the legal and social justice dimensions of drug-related problems. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has recently established a dedicated branch to manage the movement of drugs across international borders, sports anti-doping agencies increasingly find themselves caught in geo-political conflicts, and laws have increasingly expanded to regulate the use of drugs during and prior to sexual encounters.

Law regulates drugs and movement, often at the same time. This plays out in laws regulating bodies with drugs moving across international and sometimes sub-national borders; laws restricting the ways that bodies affected by drugs can move in diverse areas such as driving, sports, and sex; and laws that control the movement of bodies with a history of drug use via mechanisms such as interlock devices, ankle bracelets, and custody cells.

Law often seeks to regulate the movement of bodies that are deemed unruly due to the use of drugs, and this can carry consequences for those who use them. It is notable that the legal regulation of drugs that escalated during the temperance movement also led to a prohibition of sound and dance forms, suggestive of connections between forms of music, drugs, and dance, such as alcohol and jazz, reggae and cannabis, raves and ecstasy, and so on. In contrast to movement, fixation is a common thematic in the legal regulation of dance, copyright, and choreography, as well as in drug regulation, taxonomy, and classification, suggesting confluences between fixation and legitimation as compared to unfixity and deviance. 

Thinking through movement can also provoke new methods of conducting legal research into drugs issues, including arts-based methods such as dance. Arts-based methods of socio-legal research offer new ways of exploring the intersections of law, drugs, and moving bodies through lifting law from the page to the stage.

Presentations

 

The seminar started off with a welcome and opening, followed by the first session, which included presentations from Alejandra Zuluaga (La Trobe University, Australia) offering a decolonial perspective on the interpretation and application of human rights in drug policy and the epistemic barriers that shape rights-compatible drug policy-making; Rossio Motta-Ochoa (University of Montreal, Canada) on managed alcohol programs for Indigenous populations and issues of cultural adaptation, movement, and unruly bodies; and Veera Kankainen (University of Helsinki, Finland) presenting a critical analysis of Finnish law reform processes in relation to involuntary drug treatment over the past 15 years with attention to the subject of rights.

After lunch, the second panel included presentations from Liam Michaud (York University, Canada) on police discretion and relational economies of drug distribution, which offered a rethinking of ‘punitiveness’ and ‘leniency’ in street-level enforcement; Kate Seear (Deakin University, Australia) presenting an abecedarium of multispecies considerations in drug law, policy, and practice; and Vincent Gaillard (Northumbria University, England) dissecting the multiple facets of – and legal approaches to – sexual consent between queer men in the context of drug-involved sexual activity and composing a ‘chemsexed consent jigsaw’.

The final session featured movement-based presentations from Maria Federica Moscati (University of Sussex, England) on hormones, movement, and the law; and Sean Mulcahy (La Trobe University, Australia) exploring the legal borderlands and narco-frontiers in the law and justice system’s response to drug-related sexual offences.

The seminar featured presenters from different career stages (ranging from postgraduate researchers to professors), different geographies (including Australia, Canada, Finland, and England with backgrounds in Italy, France, Peru, and Colombia), different research backgrounds (including law, theatre, dance, art, sociology, and critical development studies), and different genders and sexualities. The issues that the seminar covered were also incredibly diverse, with analyses of borders, movement, sex, carceral spaces, race, more-than-human or multispecies worlds, queerness, and gender. The introduction of movement- and dance-based methods of socio-legal research to these issues offered an innovative way of conducting, presenting, and disseminating legal research and innovative insights into the issues raised.

Future directions

 

Following the seminar, the convenors will be producing a special issue/section of Contemporary Drug Problems featuring pieces and works presented at or connected to the themes of the seminar. We acknowledge the support of the SLSA as, through their funding, we were able to offer travel and accommodation bursaries to two precarious or postgraduate researchers to enable them to attend the seminar and cover many of the costs of the event.

For further information, please see Gender, Law, and Drugs.