On the biopolitics of humane drug policies: What can we learn from 19th century sobriety boards?

Background: In accordance with recommendations from The United Nations' Chief Executives Board of Coordination, several countries are in the process of reforming their punitive drug policies towards health-based approaches - from punishment to help. The Portuguese model of decriminalisation is generally seen as a good model for other countries and has been scientifically described in favourable terms, and not much scrutinised.

Method: This article draws on foucauldian archaeological and genealogical approaches in order to understand and compare governance logics of the 19th century Norwegian sobriety boards and 21st century Portuguese commissions.

Governance of substance use as a by-product of policing in Norway: A historical account.

Aim: The aim of this article was to study governance of drug use in Norway through a historical account.

Method: A genealogy was conducted through the study of documentation and legal texts from the 1600s until contemporary times.

Findings: Based on legal texts addressing people using substances (both drugs and alcohol) various strategies for governance of drug use appears.

Saving Deaf Children? Screening for Hearing loss as a Public-interest Case.

New-born screening programs for congenital disorders and chronic disease are expanding worldwide and children "at risk" are identified by nationwide tracking systems at the earliest possible stage. These practices are never neutral and raise important social and ethical questions. An emergent concern is that a reflexive professionalism should interrogate the ever earlier interference in children's lives.

Parental expectations of maternal and child health services.

This article reports on survey research (N = 1,418) aimed at examining whether parental expectations of maternal and child health (MCH) services are influenced by group characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status [SES], ethnicity, at risk of poverty) and/or individual parenting context variables (e.

Informal social support in contexts of diversity: shaping the relationship between the public and the private sphere.

This paper aims to re-examine the social dimension of social support as the shared responsibility of social work and families in shaping social support rather than pressuring parents' individual responsibilities, as this has been a significantly under-theorised issue in social work research. In our qualitative study, we discuss parents' experiences of informal social support in Centres for Children and Parents (CCP) in two cities in Belgium. During 2012, six discussion groups were held with 29 mothers, three fathers and one nanny who visited one of the CCP included in the project.