Pyatak drifters: The making of social and cultural places in Ukrainian cities

Abstract

This research aimed to develop and apply a comprehensive qualitative approach to gathering and analyzing data on marginalized groups, particularly people who inject drugs. Driven by the methodological question of how to study people who inject drugs, we were simultaneously led by the substantive question of how people who inject drugs transform urban spaces into specific social and cultural places while pursuing their everyday paths to HIV prevention and treatment programs implemented in Ukrainian cities.

Based on our qualitative findings, we describe and analyze the social and cultural space of different meeting places, so-called pyatak. These may be chronologically and spatially located at a distance from the time and place of drug use, but they nevertheless influence or define drug use as a complex social and cultural practice. We hypothesize that a certain injecting drug use culture embedded in the space of pyatak has emerged in Ukraine. Limited in terms of resources and legitimacy, this culture is reproduced through the interaction of people who inject drugs drifting from one pyatak to another.