Abstinent Everyday Life. Navigational Strategies and Techniques in the Context of Alcohol Dependency

• Applicant: Dr. Ina Kuhn
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556376662

The project “Abstinent Everyday Life" examines from an empirical and cultural-analytical perspective the everyday strategies and techniques that people with experiences of addiction establish and apply in order to live abstinently in the context of an alcohol-dominated society. The project understands abstinence not as passive idleness, but as ‘active inaction’ that requires specific cultural competencies and everyday strategies. The aim of the project is to make the socio-cultural challenges and negotiations of alcohol abstinence visible and to show that abstinence is not just a therapeutic measure, but a complex cultural practice and competence that is actively shaped and maintained in everyday life. In order to investigate abstinence as an everyday practice, it pursues an ethnographic research approach: the project includes a combination of participant observation, informal conversations and qualitative interviews. A group of people with experience of addiction is accompanied over a period of one year in order to document their strategies and techniques of everyday navigation in detail. The project aims to make the social plurality of abstinent living visible and to challenge stereotypical and stigmatizing ideas of former addicts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants