Learning how to live well: the transformative potential of youth AOD biopedagogies

We draw on the concept of 'biopedagogies' to explore the effects of 'living skills' training for young people in alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment; that is, the knowledge and skill needed for everyday living to manage work, relationships and self-care. In-depth interviews conducted longitudinally with 38 young people explored how these pedagogies regulated participants' everyday practices and also produced unanticipated outcomes. We found that 'pedagogies for living well' governed in predictable ways by setting up norms promoting self-management and affording subjectivities as 'healthy' rather than 'addicted' and responsible rather than compulsive. Importantly, there were transformative effects whereby pedagogies for living well, especially the skill-building around paid work, produced new orientations to the future in which young people felt that reduction and cessation of substance use was achievable and that they had promising futures if the correct conditions were present. Thus, pedagogies for living well achieved their goal - to reduce substance use - but not through rationalist logics that assume young people straightforwardly take up information about 'living skills' and enact desired behaviours. Instead, pedagogies reap benefits for young people when they embrace a relational understanding of substance use as a practice that emerges from the social conditions of young people's lives.