• Dorte Marie Søndergaard, Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Jody Miller, Professor, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, Newark, USA
• Gill Valentine, Professor, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK
• Anna Bredström, Post.doc., Linköping University, Sweden
• Elisabeth Ettorre, Emeritus Professor, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Liverpool, UK

Dorte Marie Søndergaard, Aarhus University

Dorte Marie Søndergaard is perhaps the most well-known Danish gender researcher, and her engagement with this field has taken place over a number of years. This has resulted in an extensive list of publications on gender issues. The central thrust of her work is theoretically oriented, and she is therefore an ideal choice to open the conference. In her presentation “Bringing bodies, imagery, and subjectification together in analytical approaches to complex social phenomena and gendered entanglements”, she will discuss the recent theoretical developments in gender studies. Her talk will draw specifically on newer theories such as agential realism and developments within materialist theory. She will conclude by suggesting possible applications of these theories to alcohol and drug research.

Jody Miller, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, Newark, USA

Professor Jody Miller is one of the leading criminologists in the US, specializing in research on gender and criminal behavior. In 2001, Professor Miller published a seminal work on girls in the gang “One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs and Gender” which examined the causes, nature and meaning of female involvement in gangs. The themes of gender and violence were developed further in her next book “Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality and Gendered Violence” (2008). As a criminologist, Professor Miller will bring to the conference not merely a specific criminological perspective, but also the importance of gender in studies on crime and delinquency. Her keynote talk, “Inequality and the Social Organization of Drug Networks: Insights from Feminist Criminology”, will examine the contemporary debates about femininity and crime and consider their applicability to a discussion of gender and drug dealing.

Gill Valentine, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK

Since 1995, Professor Valentine has played a key role in the development of cultural geography in the UK and the US and has conducted research on social identities, lifestyle and exclusion. Originally her work focused on issues of gender and sexuality and she published an important collected edition with David Bell “Mapping Desire”, which examined the geographies of sexualities. Since then she has published 14 books and over 100 journal articles. Most recently, she and her colleagues examined the social “geographies” of alcohol consumption in deprived urban and rural locations. Her geographical perspective will play a critical role in the conference as she brings to the discussion a specific focus on the importance of spatial practices and their relationship to the consumption of alcohol and drugs. Her keynote presentation “The Age of Excess: gender, sexuality and the new social geographies of alcohol consumption” will explore the importance of utilizing a cultural and geographical perspective in examining issues of gender, sexuality and drinking.

Anna Bredström, Linköping University, Sweden

Anna Bredström is a Post.doc researcher at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University. Her doctoral dissertation Safe Sex, Unsafe Identities: Intersections of “Race”, Gender and Sexuality in Swedish HIV/AIDS Policy (2008) explored the ways in which migration, ethnicity and racism have been approached in Swedish HIV/AIDS policy since the early 1980s. She has continued to pursue this line of research in her current research project, which addresses youth and sexual health. From 2009-2010 Bredström was a guest researcher at the Swedish Centre of Gender Excellence (GEXcel) at Örebro University. Her areas of interest are the boundaries between culture and nature and feminist theory on intersectionality, and her work has been published in Race & Class, Sexualities, European Journal of Women’s Studies and Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies. Intersections between gender, sex and ethnicity (and other categories as well, e.g. social class) seem obvious in the alcohol and drugs field, but is yet an underdeveloped area of study. Bredström’s profound experience with the concept of intersectionality makes her a very qualified candidate for trying to strengthen this approach. This is precisely what she will explore in her talk “Theorizing gender and ethnicity: intersectional perspectives on alcohol research”.

Elisabeth Ettorre, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Liverpool, UK

Professor Elizabeth Ettorre has had a consistent interest in women’s studies, gender, sexuality, substance use and the sociology of health and illness since 1973 when she began her PhD at the London School of Economics. Since then her focus within the addiction field has been on developing a feminist embodiment perspective, which problematizes issues of gender, sexuality and the body. Professor Ettorre has published extensively in the substance use research fields and her early work included Women and Substance Abuse (1992) and Gendered Moods (1995). Her interests in drugs, gender and sexuality were brought together first in her edited book Making Lesbians Visible in the Substance Use Field (2005) and then later in Revisioning Women and Drug Use (2007). Her latest book, Gendering Addiction, written with Nancy Campbell, was published in 2011 and deals with gender and drug treatment in the US and the UK. Professor Ettorre will provide the closing key note address “Embodied deviance, gender and epistemologies of ignorance: Re-visioning drugs use in a neurochemical, unjust world”, in which she develops further her theories of embodiment, gender and drugs.