Thinking About Drinking is a philosophy-led, interdisciplinary project that asks how alcohol and drinking practices are conceptualised in public health, culture, and ethics. Contemporary debate tends to treat “alcohol consumption” as a uniform, measurable object, framed predominantly through risk and harm. The project starts from the thought that drinking is also a culturally embedded human practice, structured by meanings, contexts, identities, pleasures, and norms. Bringing those dimensions into view is not an attempt to deny harms, but to develop a fuller and more realistic understanding of what drinking is, why it matters, and how guidance and policy acquire authority.

Workshop (Durham University, 11 April 2025)

In April 2025, CPEMPH hosted a workshop bringing together scholars, practitioners, and stakeholders to rethink alcohol use, addiction, and recovery. The workshop was kindly supported by the Wellcome Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. The aim was exploratory: to surface conceptual and methodological blindspots in existing approaches, and to identify promising directions for genuinely interdisciplinary work.

Themes emerging from the workshop

Discussion clustered around several connected themes:

• Pleasure, positivity, and the “good” of drinking. How can we conceptualise and study enjoyment and other positive aspects of drinking without reductionism, and without trivialising harms? What would “good drinking” mean, and what ethical issues arise when studying it?
• Epistemology, measurement, and methodological pluralism. Participants highlighted limitations of standard quantitative approaches and the need for richer methodological repertoires (including qualitative, ethnographic, historical, and philosophical approaches) to capture the complexity of drinking behaviour and its meanings.
• Addiction, disease, and classification. What is gained and lost when alcohol problems are framed as medical disorders? How do different professional discourses (public health, medicine, social care) shape what “addiction” is taken to be?
• Recovery as plural and meaning-laden. Recovery is not one thing. Discussion emphasised diversity of pathways and identities, and asked what inclusive, culturally sensitive recovery environments might require.
• Context and culture. Drinking, abstention, and recovery are locally and historically situated. Comparative and cross-cultural perspectives (including North–South comparisons) may help reveal assumptions embedded in dominant policy narratives.

A developing framework

A later internal “pitch to peers” articulated a philosophy-led framework for taking these questions forward, organised around a deceptively simple question: How much is too much? The framework distinguishes three dimensions:

• How much of what? (conceptual analysis of drinking versus “alcohol consumption”)
• How much for what? (measurement, evidence, and the assumptions built into metrics of harm and benefit)
• How much according to whom? (authority, legitimacy, and the social processes that establish norms and guidelines)

Current status

Thinking About Drinking remains an active line of work within CPEMPH. Following the 2025 workshop, collaborators have continued discussions about possible next steps and the shape of a further programme of research. We will share updates on this page as plans crystallise.