Staff Profiles

Since August 2014, Liviu is recognised as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

At Oxford Brookes, he is leading on, and contributing to, taught modules on the political economy of crime, transnational comparative criminology, crime and the media, cultural criminology, drug cultures and policy, criminological research methods and other subject areas. 

Modules taught

Crime, Capitalism and Markets (module leader).

Globalisation and Crime (module leader).

The Carnival and Pleasures of Crime (module leader).

Dealing with Drugs: Strategy, Policy and Practice (module leader).

Researching Crime: Methods, Approaches and Ethics.

Crime and Criminology in Context.

Crime in Theory and Practice.

Liviu's research interests sit at the crossroads of sociology, criminology and media/culture studies, with a strong focus on critical drug studies and social theory. 

His main goal is to explore ways in which socio-criminological, theory-informed critical thinking can explain acts, material realities and 'moral careers' of deviance and crime, as well as the 'spoiled identities' and negative labels attached to them by wider society. He has developed a rather 'figurational' approach to this, focusing on discourse, power and ideology, on one side, but also looking into how these flow and cascade ‘on the ground’, at a more grassroots level of meaning and practice, on the other. This also reflects his commitment and ability to do discourse analysis (media, policy, moral entrepreneurship) at the macro-cultural level, but also to do grassroots immersive research (expert and lay interviews, ethnography) at the micro-field level.

Liviu's recent research deals with the often blurry boundaries between recreational and medical substance use. It focuses on people who inject drugs within opiate substitution treatment settings and the various meanings and practices they could attach to new psychoactive substances (NPS) or (now former) ‘legal highs’ which they integrated into their own repertoires. It is largely based on qualitative in-depth interviews with users and health workers, but also on firsthand field observational data. This has allowed him to develop specialist knowledge in the areas of drug use, harm, policing and policy-making. He has extensively researched and written on drug policy and reform topics, for both academic and non-academic audiences.

At the moment, he is also working on analysing and theorising popular media reporting around the figure of the 'Spice zombie', which ridicules the increased visibility of vulnerable rough sleepers on synthetic cannabinoids ('Spice') within public spaces. He critiques this as another instance of underclass stigma, that dismisses and deflects attention away from the toxic effects of economic austerity.   

Journal articles

• Alexandrescu L, Spicer J, 'The stigma-vulnerability nexus and the framing of drug problems'
  Drugs: Education, Prevention, and Policy online first (2022)
  ISSN: 0968-7637 eISSN: 1465-3370
  Abstract

  This paper proposes a stigma-vulnerability nexus as a critical incursion into understandings of and responses to drug-related social problems. Considering stigma and vulnerability as sites of ostensibly empathetic interventions that aim to mitigate the impact of illicit substances, it proposes that the two concepts are best deployed when located within the political economy of drug harms. Doing so foregrounds the material inequalities resulting from existing socio-economic arrangements and highlights the limitations of them being politically mobilised in purely cultural-interactional ways, which can serve to overlook structural conditions and justify harmful political choices. As a theoretical perspective, the stigma-vulnerability nexus is therefore concerned with the macro-structural factors that shape both concepts and how they intersect. To demonstrate its value as an analytic tool, it is first applied to the framing of ‘County Lines’ dealing, where senior gang members are stigmatised, but the wider drivers of vulnerability among the young people they exploit are overlooked. Secondly, the nexus is applied to the case of new psychoactive substances. Here, the perceived vulnerability of young people is used to justify responses that ultimately lead to amplified harms being displaced onto structurally disadvantaged populations such as the homeless and prison inmates, compounding their economic vulnerability and class stigma.
  

  Website 
• Alexandrescu L, 'Violence, crime dystopia and the dialectics of (dis)order in The Purge films'
  Crime, Media, Culture Online first (2021)
  ISSN: 1741-6590 eISSN: 1741-6604
  Abstract

  Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to order, civilise and make life secure are expressed. In The Purge film franchise, crime becomes legal in America for a night each year, when violence and destructive impulses are freely discharged and actively encouraged by the US government. This article proposes a critical discussion of some of the criminological themes in the films, reading the institutionalised carnage of Purge night as a metaphor for the systemic violence of the market and further on for liberal governance as a philosophy of war, scarred by the horror of hidden monsters. It then argues that dystopian aesthetics can obscure the failures and antagonisms of the social order in the present, as well as punctuate anti-utopian fears of the future.
  

  Website 
• Alexandrescu L, 'Streets of the "spice zombies": Dependence and poverty stigma in times of austerity'
  Crime, Media, Culture 16 (1) (2019) pp.113-
  ISSN: 1741-6590 eISSN: 1741-6604
  Abstract

  Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids (‘spice’-type drugs) have moved into unregulated street markets and have become popular among homeless populations in the United Kingdom. Images of so-called ‘spice zombies’, rough sleepers in public spaces experiencing severe substance-induced fits, have been used by local and national media to suggest the growing scale of the problem. This article proposes that such depictions should be read through a cultural analysis rooted in the political economy of austerity policies, where the twofold stigma of substance and welfare dependencies directs guilt at the poor, concealing the systemic cruelty of benefits reforms. Through the circulation of such tropes and the ridiculing of a superfluous abject underclass that embodies them, media and political discourses of the ‘broken society’ highlight an evident need for welfare reduction and more generally for the austerity project.
  

  Website 
• Alexandrescu L, '"Ethnobotanicals" and "Spice zombies": new psychoactive substances in the mainstream media'
  Drugs: Education, Prevention, and Policy 25 (4) (2018) pp.356-364
  ISSN: 0968-7637 eISSN: 1465-3370
  Abstract

  This paper observes and compares discursive framings of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in parts of the mainstream media in Romania and the United Kingdom. It assembles a corpus of about 800 news items and looks into samples of reporting from 2009 to 2017. In Romania, NPS or more generally ‘ethnobotanicals’ were first associated with gullible youths experimenting with what appeared to be synthetic cannabinoids only for public attention to briefly move on to stimulant powders displacing heroin among injecting users, later on. In the UK, the synthetic cathinone mephedrone was presented by tabloids as a ‘menace’ to teenagers and other young users, only for synthetic cannabinoids to eventually be linked with rough sleepers and other vulnerable groups. Through this, qualitative distinctions are shown in the portraying of a middle-class notion of naïve but ‘clean’ youth, valuable in itself, and the portraying of abject underclass users, mostly as a threatening and contagious presence. Beyond alarmism and exaggeration, drug news reporting thus also appears rooted in class politics and structural inequalities where NPS meet with the lived conditions and spoiled identities of disadvantaged groups.

  Website 
• Alexandrescu L, 'NPS and the methadone queue: Spillages of space and time'
  International Journal of Drug Policy 40 (February) (2017) pp.50-56
  ISSN: 0955-3959
  Abstract Background. Between 2008 and 2013, powder-stimulants sold by ‘head shops’ as novel psychoactive substances (NPS) or ‘legal highs’ have displaced heroin among groups of injecting substance users in Bucharest, Romania. Rising HIV-infection rates and other medical or social harms have been reported to follow this trend. Methods. The study builds on two sets of original (N = 30) and existing (N = 20) interview data and on observations collected mainly at the site of a methadone substitution treatment facility. Results. By disentangling the space–time continuum of the methadone queue, this paper argues that injecting drug users’ (IDUs) passage from opiates to amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) can be understood as ‘spillages’ of space and time. IDUs thus ‘spill’ out of the disciplinary flows of methadone treatment in two ways. The first is that of space and materiality. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), ATS/NPS appear embedded in reconfigured practices and rituals of injecting use. Such spillages see the pleasure-seeking self being fluidised in forming connections with, or spilling into, nonhuman actants such as substances, settings or objects. The second dimension of spilling is that of time. In this sense, heroin use is a ‘cryogenic strategy’ of inhabiting history and facing the transition to the market society that Romanian opiate injectors spill out of, not able to appropriate choice and legitimate consumption. The phenomenological qualities of stimulants that seem to accelerate lived time and generalise desire thus present them with an opportunity to alleviate a form of what a post-communist moral imaginary of transition frames as debilitating nostalgia. Conclusion. ATS/NPS are revealed as fluid entities that do not only shape risk conditions but also alter shared meanings and contextual configurations of bodies, substances and disciplinary regimes in unpredictable ways.Website 
• Alexandrescu L, 'Injecting ATS/NPS use and drug abjection in Romania'
  Drugs and Alcohol Today 16 (2) (2016) pp.142-149
  ISSN: 1745-9265
  Abstract Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a group of Romanian injecting substance users “migrating” from heroin to novel psychoactive substances (NPS) as a counterpublic seeking to escape the stigma of drug abjection. Design/methodology/approach. The findings are drawn from interview and observational data collected mainly at drug services sites in Bucharest, Romania. Findings. The stimulant powders sold by head shops appealed to experienced drug users because they seemed to emulate a consumerist ethos and cultivate a healthy, rational agent that popular discourses of addiction deem incompatible with drug careers. NPS and head shops were thus initially understood as a possibility of escaping “junk identities”. However, they ultimately sealed injectors as abject bodies that obstructed the collaborative goals of rehabilitation and health restoration. A sense of symbolic distance shaped by notions of moral and bodily hygiene separated heroin and NPS users, as the latter increasingly came to be seen and see themselves as flawed consumers of health and freedom. Practical implications. NPS retail spaces could present valuable opportunities to insert harm-reduction resources and harness counterpublic health strategies. Social implications. Dominant definitions of substance use as unavoidable paths into self-destruction push users towards unknown compounds they can attach more fluid meanings to. This suggests that prohibitionist language still obscures rational dialogue about existing and emerging drugs. Originality/value. The paper traces ATS/NPS in an Eastern European context offering an alternative vantage point to harm-focused perspectives.Website 
• Alexandrescu L, 'Mephedrone, assassin of youth: The rhetoric of fear in contemporary drug scares'
  Crime, Media, Culture 10 (1) (2014) pp.23-37
  ISSN: 1741-6590 eISSN: 1741-6604
  Abstract This article examines how mephedrone, the most popular legal high sold freely in the United Kingdom until its classification as a high-risk drug, in April 2010, was constructed by the British popular media as a moral epidemic that threatened the very symbolic heart of the nation – its youth. News of teenagers committing suicide after taking the drug or dying of overdose had been presented in the pages of tabloid dailies for months when the government decided to ban the substance despite the lack of solid scientific data on the medical and social risks it posed. Drawing on Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies, this article demonstrates how in its attempt to influence national policy the media largely responded to the new drug problem with panic discourses that perpetuated the old ‘war on drugs’ ideology, choosing to frame mephedrone as an agent of death and moral downfall even when its destructive influence was questionable. In this perspective, a blueprint made of multiple layers of historical drug scares and repressive drug policies shaped the metaphors and narratives used by the media to codify a sense of threat and by the audiences to interpret the symptoms of a social pathology.Website 

Further information

Academia.edu:

https://oxfordbrookes.academia.edu/Liviu_Alexandrescu

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/LiviuAlexand