Understanding addiction: The shift from epistemology to ontology

Ways to get a more balanced gender representation in addiction journals' management and workforce

Although the scientific community, particularly academic publishing, claims to be gender-neutral and based on meritocracy, it mirrors other parts of modern society, wherein residual gender imbalances and implicit and explicit gender biases are reproduced. In this report, we address gender imbalances (in particular, the overrepresentation of men) in the editorial workforce of academic journals as barriers to women's promotion and career progression in addiction science. We also consider potential gender-related elements and biases in the peer-review and editorial decision-making processes, which may result in women's lower publication rates, thereby creating another gender-related barrier to women's promotion, career progression and academic recognition. Establishing a more balanced gender representation in addiction publishing will require the adoption of the SAGER guidelines and the development of Gender Equality Plans for addiction specialty journals. Finally, although our focus concerns gender, the organisational mechanisms identified here also affect other types of heterogeneity and intersectional thinking.

Coronavirus, capitalism and a 'thousand tiny dis/advantages': a more-than-human analysis

This paper establishes a relational, post-anthropocentric and materialist approach to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Analysis of the 'pandemic assemblage' reveals that the virus has subverted the social and economic relations of capitalism, enabling its global spread. This insight establishes a materialist framework for exploring socio-economic disparities in Covid-19 incidence and death rates, via a more-than-human and monist analysis of capitalist production and markets. Disparities derive from the 'thousand tiny dis/advantages' produced by people's daily interactions with human and non-human matter, making sense of the unequal occupational patterning of coronavirus incidence. This more-than-human approach supplies a critical alternative to the mainstream public health and scientific perspectives on the pandemic, with important implications for current and future policy to counter future microbiological outbreaks.