The phenomenon of addiction enables studies of how society governs citizens and produces (healthy) bodies through classifications and definitions within treatment, science, and politics. Definitions and explanations of addiction change over time, and collective narratives of addiction in society are shared between scientific, official, and colloquial discourses. It is thus reasonable to argue that scientists, clinicians, and practitioners, as well as politicians, journalists, and laypersons, co-create addiction as a (bio)medical, social, and cultural phenomenon defined by varying actions, experiences, contexts, and meanings. The mass media is a key link between science and citizens. Explanations and definitions of the nature and causes of, and solutions for, addiction are provided by science and communicated to the rest of the society in popular scientific representations. While the language of scientific discourse is actively used, reproduced, and redefined in everyday language, laypersons are seldom acknowledged as active participants in studies of knowledge coproduction. This study examines how 25 newspaper readers interpret and explain dimensions of addiction phenomena through their own knowledge and interpretation of scientific representations in the media. The analysis shows how (popular) scientific biomedical addiction discourse interacts with newspaper readers’ interpretations, focusing on lay discussion of the causes of and solutions for addiction, how lay coproduction of scientific explanations is made, and how we can understand it. The study contributes to our understanding of the complex network of interacting and competing actors coproducing knowledge of addiction, emphasizing laypersons’ involvement in this process.

Arenas where experts interact with publics are useful platforms for communication and interaction between actors in the field of public health: researchers, practitioners, clinicians, patients, and laypersons. Such coalitions are central to the analysis of knowledge coproduction. This study investigates an initiative for assembling expert and other significant knowledge which seeks to create better interventions and solutions to addiction-related problems, in this case codependency. But what and whose knowledge is communicated, and how? The study explores how processes of repetition, claim-coupling, and enthusiasm produce a community based on three boundary beliefs: (1) victimized codependent children failed by an impaired society; (2) the power of daring and sharing; and (3) the (brain) disease model as the scientific representative and explanation for (co)dependence. These processes have legitimized future hopes in certain suffering actors, certain lived and professional expertise and also excluded social scientific critique, existing interventions, and alternative accounts.

This study investigates the interaction between civil servants and politicians in a planning committee in a Swedish county council. As the committees are venues for preparation of future decision-making, civil servants and others are invited to inform and report to the politicians on different topics. The aim is to explore this local interaction process based on an analysis of requests and responses. It is shown that the communication between civil servants and politicians is pervaded by sociability in the form of conversational routines. The article aims to recognize this sociability as an intrinsic part of knowledge coproduction processes. Civil servants and politicians negotiate different types of professional, common, and altruistic knowledge claims through routines that dislocate time, responsibility, roles, and protocol order.These activities – important but often circumvented in studies of policy-making – are explored as instances of conversational coproduction.