Locating the E-cigarette Multiple

Abstract

The amendment of e-cigarette regulations in Norway was an effect of an interference between the European Union Tobacco Products Directive and Norwegian legislation. This interference opened up a window for corporate, activist, scientific and bureaucratic communities to articulate their e-cigarette concerns, anxieties, and hopes. This thesis explores the diverse e-cigarette enactments and how interferences between them make up the e-cigarette. The e-cigarette is studied as an object multiple. By attending to how the e-cigarette is done or enacted in practice, multiple e-cigarette realities come to the fore. Multiplicity implies more than plurality in that the diverse enactments overlap, link and depend on each other. Firstly, the thesis asks how the e-cigarette is enacted in different practices. In the corporate space the e-cigarette is enacted through branding practices that exclude the e-cigarette from their “smoke-free economy”. In the activist space the e-cigarette is enacted by mobilizing “attachments” (personal dependencies with the e-cigarette) and evidence-based practices based on user experiences. Through the scientific space the e-cigarette is enacted via research reports that act as different types of political technologies in the e-cigarette debate either by influencing how the Ministry of Health and Care Services regulates the e-cigarette or by articulating alternative policies. In the bureaucratic space, techniques and tools of policy making open up the e-cigarette issue in the first place and contain the e-cigarette debate in specific ways. Secondly the thesis asks how these e-cigarette enactments are held together. By answering this question, this thesis contributes to topological conceptions of objects that are made into policy. In the initial stages of policy formation the e-cigarette can be analyzed through the flow topology - the coordination of practices in tension. While when the e-cigarette is made into policy the fire topology is more adequate – the simultaneous presence of the single policy, dependent on the absence of multiple dissenting voices which have been silenced