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Mapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

Ohio University, USA

This article maps the discursive closing of the most recent war on drugs through a series of case studies drawn from popular culture. This kind of work is performed in an effort to theorize the reflexive role of structure and agency in criminological representation. Each of the three selected cases demonstrates important shifts in conventions of representation that are historically contingent and recursively embedded in developing understandings of the relationship between drugs, individual actors and larger structural forces of sovereignty, inequality, and criminality. Each highlights the nature of a protracted crisis of representation in popular narratives of the war on drugs, where individual actors, even in their most mainstream manifestations, are depicted as caught within complex institutional contradictions which often paradoxically affirm and subvert drug war contexts.

Key Words: discursive gap/closing • refl exivity • representation • structure and agency • war on drugs

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