In the third of a series of interviews with our new Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellows, we catch up with Shayla Sue Schlossenberg. Shayla is currently Head of the Drugs Service at Release. Read on to find out about their research and plans for the Fellowship.
If your research was a film, what would the title be?
Oh goodness, I am so bad at these sorts of questions… maybe “Nothing About Us Without Us: Stories from Drug User Activists at the British Margins, from the 1960s to the present.”
I am hoping a catchier title will emerge from the project itself though!
What will you be doing during your Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowship?
During the fellowship, much of my time will be spent forging new and deepening old relationships with some of the coolest people I’ve ever met. That is to say, I will get to be professionally curious, conducting pretty open ended interviews with drug user activists to hear them reminisce on the good, bad, and ugly things about the drug user movement. In that time, I will specifically pry about the relationships people held which functioned as the glue of the movement in their time, as I want to know more about the behind the scenes characters and start to meet and speak with those individuals in particular. Ultimately, I will be looking to both piece together and pick apart bits of this movement’s history in order to turn our attention towards the more invisibilized contributors in this saga.
What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on?
I have four categories of experience I would consider relevant to this work: academic, professional, interpersonal and individual.
Academically, I have done a master’s thesis about harm reduction in the UK, which involved interviewing practitioners who had been in the field for some time. Despite this work not being about activism, two thirds of the interviewees had a history of activism in the drugs’ space. The individuals I interviewed were incredibly generous with their time and knowledge, and much of the credit for my current understanding of the drugs world goes to them. The thesis also gave me the opportunity to read up on existing literature on British harm reduction, and become familiar with academics who would go on to be the collaborators in the prequel paper to this project.
Professionally, as part of my current role at Release, I convene networks of experts, including drug user activists, for advocacy purposes as well as in emergency response to dangerous shifts in the drug market. Most of my connections today were brought about through Release work, and I’m privileged to be no more than a few degrees away from anyone doing drug user activism or familiar with its history as a result of my organizational affiliation.
This then leads me on to the interpersonal domain – through working in this field for some years, many of my own closest friends have come from this movement and are my co-conspirators today. This project likely wouldn’t have come about without our group hangouts and story telling sessions inspiring us to look into the undocumented histories of this movement and to seek out the discrepancies between all the various recountings of how we got to where we are in the UK at present.
Finally, as an individual who has been around the block, I have my own experiences of navigating harm reduction services and also operating in different movement spaces. Both of these worlds provide me insights to draw upon for this project which I am sure will be of benefit. I am also sure they will bias me in other ways which if unchecked could hinder the project, such as leading me to make implicit values judgements on certain organising tactics or types of contributions.
Why are you excited about working in the medical humanities?
I’ll be honest that before stumbling upon this fellowship, I did not know much about the medical humanities field. I did my Master’s degree in social anthropology (with a fairly heavy medical focus).
Anthropology is a prominent discipline in the medical humanities field however, and my anthropology education certainly exposed me to the medical humanities area of study without me knowing it by name at the time.
I think medical humanities is the perfect home for the work I am embarking on as the histories of drug user activists’ contributions are all entangled with the histories of themselves as individuals with specific health experiences. I already know that the activists who I will speak with are themselves people who were originally exposed to this social movement through the experiences they had with their own health and the ways in which systems of care neglected their specific health needs. I’m excited – and also a bit intimidated – by the interdisciplinary aspect of working in the medical humanities, especially the more artistic disciplines. As you’ve probably seen in the answer to my first question, creative prompts can easily frighten me and I am hoping that is something I can shake off through engagement and support from the IMH. I do believe that the use of more creative methods both for data collection and the final write up will be critical to delivering this project in a manner which makes it generative for those who partake and the broader drug user movement.
What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
Personally, I would like to see UK drug user organising spoken about as a 1) still existing and 2) a collective and community-driven effort. As is true of many movements, dominant institutions in the drugs’ world often take interest in individual activists rather than collectives, and when those institutions also influence knowledge production about this space, we end up with stories of the rise and fall of specific hero figures who appear to exist in a vacuum. The tales of these individuals also often aren’t recorded until long after they have happened. I’d also like to see some more recognition of all the different types of care and labor which makes “the work” in this space possible, specifically uplifting the contributions of people oppressed by patriarchy, racialised people, and people impacted by colonialism.
What interests or hobbies do you have outside of your research that might surprise people?
I don’t know if it would surprise people (or maybe I am just vain and hoping people notice my gains) but I weight-lift. A 90 minute strength session is my form of meditation. I also bake, although that hobby can become detrimental to the former one if left unchecked.
We warmly welcome Shayla to the Discovery Research Platform and look forward to working with them.
This year four Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowships were awarded to support the delivery of novel research projects from June 2025 to June 2026. We will be launching another Fellowship application round for 2026 to 2027 in October – if you are interested in the scheme, please keep an eye out on our website and social media.
Find out more about our 2025 Medical Humanities in Practice Fellows:
