Assembling Drinking Moralities: An Ethnographic Analysis of Youth Alcohol Use in Melbourne

Abstract

Heavy drinking occurs in complex, contradictory and heavily moralised contexts. The moral dimensions of alcohol use, however, are rarely explicitly examined in the alcohol research and policy literature. In this thesis I analyse ethnographic data on the heavy drinking practices of a network of young adults in Melbourne, Australia, to elucidate how local ‘moralities’ of alcohol use come to be assembled, and the effects of such ‘moral assemblages’ on young people’s moral subjectivities.