Dr Fay Dennis is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been working and researching in the substance use field for fifteen years. She came to the field wanting to better understand and represent the complexities of people’s drug-using experiences, and disrupt the stigmatising views and practices that curtail these experiences and cause harm.

Fay’s PhD project (2012-2016) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (supervised by Magdalena Harris and Tim Rhodes at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) drew on creative interviews with people who inject heroin in London to complicate narratives of pathology and harm with an interest in pleasure as a neglected subject in drug research and policy, especially in relation to heroin and when injected. This project was later written up as a book and shortlisted for the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness book prize.

After submitting her PhD, Fay joined a team of researchers at King’s College London looking at the relationship between interpersonal violence and substance use. She then in 2017 started as a Mildred Blaxter Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths. During this time, Fay developed a new project which was awarded funding through a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship in Social Science and Bioethics (mentored by Marsha Rosengarten and Rebecca Coleman). ‘Mapping bodies and care practices: Making people who use drugs matter’ (2018-2022) explored rising drug-related deaths in the UK using a multimodal ethnographic approach and feminist technoscience lens. Much of this project informs her current study.

One thread that runs throughout Fay’s research as she strives to better understand and represent the experiences of people who use/d substances is an interest in creative methods and their ability to afford and amplify the telling of different kinds of drug-using stories. You can see an example of how arts-based methods get employed in her work in this recent exhibition: “I am a work in progress”: The art of living with(out) drugs. For other published material on this topic, see:

Chemical species: The art and politics of living with(out) drugs after addiction

Mapping the drugged body: Telling different kinds of drug-using stories