Much of the academic literature on alcohol-based leisure focuses on the pleasures of hedonism and youthful cultural exploration in environments free from the prescriptions, pressures and routines of everyday life. In this article – in which we present data from our ongoing ethnographic research exploring the experiences and attitudes of young British tourists in the Spanish resort of Magaluf on the island of Majorca – we argue that the standard liberal social-scientific image of youth leisure is naive and misrepresents its variegated reality. Our research indicates that many young British tourists gain little contentment from their holiday in the sun. Rather than embarking on a leisure experience composed of boundless freedom, choice, indulgence, excess and that is indicative of personal consumer sovereignty, many of our interviewees could identify the regimented and commodified nature of alcohol-based tourism. Rather than satisfaction, they felt an imprecise dissatisfaction. Drawing upon elements of psychoanalytic theory, we argue that underneath our interviewees’ accounts of drunkenness and promiscuity lies an obdurate but imprecise sense of lack. Yet, it is precisely this absence which only recharges their motivation to do more of the same the year after in similar destinations, thus confirming the presence, power and domination of consumer sovereignty.
Purpose – The authors thought of the idea for this exploratory paper for Drugs and Alcohol Today after visiting a local prison on the outskirts of Madrid from which these field notes are taken. The authors have also had informal conversations with the contacts working in the Spanish Prison service. When the authors looked at some of the literature around the relationships between drugs and prisons in Spain, the authors found lots of statistics, and material which either said there were lots of drugs in prison or literature which presented over-medicalised processes of drug treatment. In short, the authors found few studies which could bring to life the kind of problems drugs bring to the prison and how the dynamics of the prison are not only directly impacted by drug use but also as drug dealing/trafficking. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – What the authors offer is only really to draw your attention to the issue. The authors have no real methodology to reflect on other than one of us is an experienced participant observer and the other is a lawyer and criminologist who has worked with numerous clients processed for drug offences in and around prisons in Madrid. Between us, we have undertaken six visits to Madrileñas prisons. Findings – In this explorative paper the authors want to do three things. First, draw attention to the extent of problem of drugs in prison in Spain. Second, the authors want to suggest that the role drugs needs reconsideration as it plays a pivotal role in the functioning of the prison. Lastly, the authors push for more research into this issue which goes beyond conventional surveys and unnecessary complex regression analyses and instead takes a qualitative approach using observational data and informal conversations to explore these dynamics in more detail. Originality/value – First, that there is an urgent need to go beyond these official statistics and explore in some nuanced detail about the prison experience in Spain. The existing research is limiting in that it talks tiresomely about the numbers incarcerated and fails to admit the significance of drugs not only as a motivating factor for incarceration but also the role drugs play in the prison environment. The authors need to consider as much the changing demography of Spanish prisons – for example more immigrants, different drugs, etc. – as the everyday experience of drugs, debt, disagreements and violence and how they intersect as a lived experience rather than consider them as separate issues of analysis, dormant from the interconnectedness of the micro-interactions of the prison environment and the respective institutional power structures. The key to this debate, and the general messages of this paper, is to realize a study which can explore the nuances of the role and function of drugs play in Spanish prisons.
This article offers a critical methodological reflection on how we undertook covert digital ethnographic research on Spanish young people and their use of online dating apps with a focus on the potential risk attached to using them. We were interested in showing how we approached the fieldwork, how we developed different research identities and how those identities were able to draw out raw data which reflected the risk attached to the online dating apps. While the project as a whole used a mixedmethods framework which also encompassed open-ended interviews and surveys, we provide a series of critical reflections attuned to digital ethnography. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to show how the methodological techniques cultivated 'identities' for our ethnographer that became effective in teasing out attitudes to risk and sexual exploration. We also hope that the paper can facilitate similar studies in the future, thus paving the way for other researchers. For this reason, we highlight the problems we encountered during the fieldwork and discuss the ethical issues related to this specific field.'Fieldwork is an exercise of multiple roles [...] it is in some ways a masquerade' (Velasco and de Rada 2006) This article offers a critical methodological reflection into how we undertook covert digital ethnographic research on Spanish young people and their use of online dating apps with a focus on the potential risk attached to using them. We are interested in showing how we approached the fieldwork, how we developed different research identities and how those identities were able to draw out raw data which reflected the risk attached to the online dating apps. We chose six dating apps commonly used by young people in Spain and undertook the study over the course of 12 months in 2018. Ethnographic studies on online dating apps are almost non-existent. Recent monographs focus instead on the role of the internet in dating (Daniels, Gregory and McMillan Cottom 2016; Smith and Duggan 2013), on men, masculinity and contemporary dating (Haywood 2018; Ryan 2016). In a similar vein, journal article authors tend to use theoretical approaches and/or quantitative surveys that focus on gender and identity (Clemens, Atkin and Krishnan 2015), online dating behavior
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an honest and critical reflection with regard to the damage neoliberalised education systems have had on the “crime science” of criminology in Spain. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a viewpoint based on our experience of teaching criminology and researching crime problems in Spain. Findings We argue that the neoliberalisation of education systems results in a “crime of science” in the sense that this produces rampant competition between university institutions which is amplified by the emergence of internal and external corporate enterprises who compete against each other in commodifying knowledge around crime which is largely focussed on a combination of statistical measurements and zonal mapping. This results in the reproduction of misleading conceptions about how crime occurs because the research is not grounded in offenders’ experiences and pays no attention to the political economy, power and corruption and the oscillating relationship between agent and social structure. This has negative implications for the development of critical knowledge which should equip we to reconceptualise how and why social problems occur. Practical implications These infractions have major implications on how we are able to report on crime problems. Social implications As researchers/students, the authors are only able “diagnose problems” and answer questions and lose the capacity to question the answers as well as question the way the authors question. Originality/value We do not think that many criminologists would be prepared to write these words (unless it was being published in a high-impact factor journal).
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