Caring in community: A narrative inquiry into liberatory harm reduction and peer education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines peer education-based harm reduction practices for peoplewho use drugs (PWUD) at music festivals and raves in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. Given the ongoing drug poisoning crisis and the criminalization of PWUD, exploring the underresearched practice of peer education is vital to the health and well-being of PWUD.Using narrative inquiry, this project draws from my personal experiences as a harmreduction volunteer and interviews with research participants to answer the overarchingresearch question: What do these narratives reveal about peer-led harm reductionpraxis? Participants are recruited from the Groupe de recherche et d'interventionpsychosociale (GRIP). The GRIP offers education and peer support in festival andnightlife spaces to empower people to make informed, less risky decisions in matters ofdrug use (GRIP, 2023). The conceptual and theoretical frameworks in the thesis areshaped by the literature on enabling environments (Rhodes, 2002; Duff, 2010), liberatoryharm reduction (Hassan, 2022), and critical pedagogy (Freire, 2018), which championbottom-up, community-based empowerment strategies for PWUD. Data collectionincludes qualitative, semi-structured one-on-one interviews with participants. The dataanalysis follows Braun and Clarke’s (2006) inductive thematic analysis, identifyingcommon themes across research interviews and triangulating them with field notes andexisting literature, leading to three conclusions. First, harm reductionists position PWUDas sources of expertise and transgressive power, which is a political act of care. Second,given the emotionally charged nature of peer support and harm reduction, communityis an enabling resource that is essential to the sustainability of the work. Third, for theseeducators, liberatory harm reduction is a way of being that advocates for collectiveaction and community care that goes beyond the dancefloor. These narratives capturethe emotional labour, unique teaching strategies, and activism of front-line harmreduction practitioners, to provide an example of effective peer-led liberatory harmreduction praxis
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".