Karenza Moore

I am a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University.

I have been researching and writing about clubs, club drugs and dance music fans for over ten years. My research explores the roles that raving/clubbing and related drug use play in the lives of people today. I have written extensively about emergent drug trends among those out and about in clubs, festivals and other dance music events. I continue to use in-situ self-report studies as a key research method to gather data on prevalence, patterns and trends targeted groups of drug-users. I also have an interest in 'recovery' from problems with alcohol and other drugs.

Further, using ethnographic methods and drawing on recent turns towards the material, affective and sensory within the social sciences, I contest simplistic notions of ‘drugs’ and explore drug use as highly contested practices involving moral significance and normative judgements. I am committed to developing what I call ‘critical drug studies’.

Taking a sociological view of intoxication (rather than or alongside epidemiological, public health and criminal justice approaches), my work explores drug use as part of situated practices in specific socioeconomic and cultural contexts such as contemporary night-time economies (NTEs) and at post-dance event 'afterparties'.