In May 2023, I was invited to present at the University of Bristol’s Arts Faculty Research Group on Drinking Studies seminar series about research projects and how to manage them. Because I don’t like doing things by halves, I decided to talk about two research projects that I had been working on between 2019 and 2022, to reflect on the experiences involved in different types of project and to test out some ideas about where the research findings of each project intersected.

The first project, led by Prof. Clare Anderson, was called Mental, Neurological and Substance Abuse Disorders in Guyana’s jails, 1825 to the present – MNS Guyana for short – and investigated the definition, extent, experience and treatment of mental health issues within the prison sector, historically and to the present day. The goal was to develop an independent evidence base that the Guyana Prison Service, with whom the project team worked in partnership throughout, could use to implement positive changes. A team of 13 researchers, split across the Universities of Guyana and Leicester, employed research methods from the disciplines of history, political science, criminology, anthropology and cultural studies. The research process and many of the project outcomes and findings are summarised on the project blog and in published papers. My role was focused on researching the history of substance use, regulation and treatment and the historical development of mental health infrastructure. One of our historical essays explored the connections between colonial systems of managing immigration, intoxication, insanity and incarceration across the 19th and 20th centuries. Working collaboratively with the team’s criminologists to produce findings to inform current policy at a stakeholders’ workshop in Georgetown, July 2022, I was then able to explain how the present-day experiences of prisoners, prison staff, their families and surrounding communities, were shaped by historically entrenched patterns of inequality and discrimination, and how aspects of the present-day justice system had been created historically under conditions of colonialism and coerced labour.

The second area of research was the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project that I’ve written a series of posts about and in which I led a small team of researchers to investigate how racial stereotypes about drinking developed in the US, Mexico and globally in the 19th and early 20th centuries. With overlapping time periods, and with overlapping interests in how problems connected to substance use are defined and treated differently over time, this project intersected in really interesting ways with the MNS Guyana project. My presentation in Bristol, after exploring the different methodologies of both projects, concentrated on how the work Jamie Banks and I did on International Anti-Alcohol Congresses from 1885 to 1939 resonated a lot with a package of work that I did on MNS Guyana looking at the development of mental health infrastructure in the Caribbean via the records of the Caribbean Conferences for Mental Health of the 1950s and 1960s. These events took place in different time periods, but both were forums that were very international and cross-disciplinary in nature and they dealt with some similar issues – particularly how to define, understand and treat alcoholism, and the relationship of alcohol related problems to race and racial difference.

I’ve done previous work on how the concept of alcoholism developed in late 19^th century Mexico (and was shaped by racial theories) so I was really interested to see how this would play out in different geographical contexts with different legacies of colonialism and racial ideologies. The starting premise of this is that understandings of alcoholism are profoundly shaped by the social and cultural forces in which they develop, and thus it will be understood differently in different times and spaces. Reflecting on the intersections of these different research projects then led to the development of a conference paper and two linked blog posts published elsewhere, Alcohol, Alcoholism and Mental Health in British Guiana, part 1, which looked at how alcoholism was understood during the late 19th century period of asylum reform in the Caribbean, and Alcohol, Alcoholism and Mental Health in British Guiana, part 2, examining how concepts of alcoholism had changed during the inaugural conferences of the Caribbean Federation for Mental Health in the mid-20th century. As well as presenting these ideas in Bristol, for the Faculty Drinking Studies research group there, I was lucky enough to present them virtually to an audience at the University of Roraima in Brazil a few days later in May 2023. With feedback from these erudite audiences, hopefully these preliminary ideas can be turned into a journal article in due course.