Practising recovery: New approaches and directions

The special section Practising recovery: New approaches and directions aims to shed light on the variety of epistemological, methodological and policy-making practices that emerge in empirical studies of recovery from the use of alcohol and other drugs (AOD). 'Recovery', as a concept and policy orientation, has received significant attention in sociological research and other disciplines. However, recovery understood as a practice that is crafted daily by service-users and workers reveals infinite manifestations that sociological research has yet to explore. Shifting from the study of recovery from AOD as a specific drug policy, to a practice-oriented study of recovery as a complex process of healing that unfolds in diverse social contexts, has the potential to advance the contribution of sociology to matters of illness and wellbeing. The articles collected for this special section begin to examine the complexity of recovery with a focus on the framing of recovery as a social, temporal, spatial and affective practice . In Practising Recovery, our aim is to focus on the routine aspects that accompany recovery as both a practice and policy object, emphasising the ambivalences, rather than the polemics of empirical engagements with recovery. In what follows, we describe our thinking about, in, and with the notion of ambivalence as an attempt to expand the meanings of recovery into unchartered terrain, before exploring some of the ways the articles in this special section serve to render visible the ambivalences that accompany the practice, as well as the methods, of researching recovery.