Sober Everyday Life. Strategies and Techniques of Navigating Abstinence in Germany

Funded by DFG (German Research Foundation), project number 556376662, project term: 10/2025–09/2029

Lead: Dr. Ina Kuhn

How to take part in alcohol-centered festivities, regulars' tables and dinner parties? How to shape friendships that revolve around these kinds of activities? Where to shop when alcohol is to be avoided? What to answer when dating partners ask why you don't drink? What to actually do while others are drinking?

In the alcohol-rich everyday culture in Germany, people experienced with addiction are confronted with questions like these again and again and encounter them with diverse, situation- and context-specific tactics and strategies: They find and create 'alternative' forms and formats (e.g. „sober bar hopping“), form (social media) communities (e.g. abstinent regulars' tables, "quit-lit" book clubs, diverse online communities), appropriate and apply (popular) therapeutic practices (e.g. 'sober' beliefs), (re-)structure and (re-)organize their daily routines, reshape individual habits and routines, and (re-)produce legitimizing knowledge and narratives linked to it.

Photo: Ina Kuhn, recorded in Freiburg. [In the picture you can see the head of a public trash can, on which a sticker with the face of the former German cyclist Jan Ullrich pasted over by a cat sticker with the inscription "Ulle was clean" is glued, underneath the words "stay sober" are written in black felt-tip pen.]

The project "Sober Everyday Life" takes an ethnographic look at these processes. From an empirical-cultural studies perspective, it examines the everyday strategies and techniques that people with experience of addiction establish and apply in order to live abstinently in the context of an alcohol-dominated society. The project understands abstinence not as passive idleness, but as active inaction that requires specific cultural competencies and everyday strategies. The idea of the project is to make the socio-cultural challenges and negotiations of alcohol abstinence visible and to show that abstinence is not only a therapeutic measure, but a complex cultural practice and life strategy that is actively shaped and maintained in everyday life. It aims to make the social plurality of abstinent living visible and to challenge stereotypical and stigmatizing ideas of former ‘addicts’.