Putting tendencies and trajectories to work: useful tools for engaging with accounts of change and recovery?

Dominant understandings of recovery emphasise personal responsibility for initiating and sustaining changes in peoples' subjectivities and relationships to alcohol and other drugs. However, this potentially obscures the complexities and temporalities of change processes and the range of socio-material elements involved. Critiquing notions of personal responsibility within recovery processes, this presentation applies the concepts of tendencies and trajectories to help explain recovery's emergence and subjective continuities. Doing so helps decentre the individual as the agent responsible for improved capacity by broadening the perspective of developing health and wellbeing. Critical drug studies scholars have productively employed the concepts of tendencies and trajectories to analyse how past events of drug consumption flow into current and future consumption events. Taking inspiration from this work, in this paper, I provide a qualitative analysis of interviews with fourteen people with lived recovery experience and fifteen professionals within an urban-rural setting in Melbourne, Australia. This analysis illustrates how recovery tendencies and trajectories are cultivated through repeated actions, habits, and practices over time. Applying the concept of trajectories to change narratives reveals how accumulated moments precede and follow turning points, supporting shifts in consumption patterns. These moments are not necessarily connected but, when considered collectively, contribute to a recovery trajectory and assemblage of health. In reflecting on the affordances of thinking, researching and doing with
recovery tendencies and trajectories, I argue that analysing tendencies and trajectories illuminates opportunities where change lies within an endless combination of human and non-human forces. Applying these concepts to recovery research, practice, and policy engages with temporal and
socio-material elements of recovery, offering a more emancipatory approach than is currently provided by common recovery theories and approaches that assume individuals are personally responsible for change.