April 13, 2011- Seminar by Visiting Researcher: "Whose responsibility is problem gambling?"

[Sherilee Diebold-Cooze]

Problem Gambling research speaker: Charles Livingstone, Monash University, "Whose responsibility is problem gambling?" Wednesday 11:00, Flex Lab, Dana Porter Library.
Details are at: http://problemgambling.uwaterloo.ca/events/  and are included below.



Lecture by Visiting Scholar<http://problemgambling.uwaterloo.ca/events/>
Wednesday, 13 April 2011 11:00 AM @ Dana Porter Library 329

Dr. Charles Livingstone from Monash University in Melbourne Australia will give a lecture at 11am in room 329 of the Dana Porter Library. Light lunch to follow at noon in the same room.


Abstract
Whose responsibility is problem gambling?
Dr Charles Livingstone, Monash University Australia

'Responsible gambling' is the rubric around which much of the effort to reduce the harms associated with gambling has been focused in recent years. Governments promote it, industry embraces it, citizens are urged to adopt it. Some years ago, Richard Woolley and I wrote that "'Responsible gambling' is a carefully structured, if elastic and goalless term, discursively transferring responsibility for industrialized (and normalized) harm production to end users. It would, perhaps, be helpful for harm minimization purposes were it to denote pursuit of the absence of harm by all means. Yet the actually existing category of 'responsible gambling' invariably ignores the EGM system's harm producing capacity." Nothing has changed in recent years to dissuade us from that view.

That said, the idea that gambling should be conducted in a responsible manner has much to recommend it. But responsibility for a dangerous or potentially dangerous product is multi-faceted and provides numerous challenges - of governance, ethics, regulation, technology, marketing, research and consumption.

This presentation seeks to highlight the responsibilities accruing at each level of this chain, identifying the relevant social institutions involved, and suggesting some ways in which their conduct might be improved. The aim of this is to suggest that if responsible gambling is, finally, to be operationalised, much work needs to be done at multiple levels to bring this about.

Bio - Dr Charles Livingstone

Dr Charles Livingstone is Deputy Head of the Department of Health Social Science, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Australia. His background is in economics and social theory. Charles's main research interests are in public health and health funding, and in technological and regulatory aspects of electronic gambling machine (EGM) gambling. His critique of existing regimes of gambling regulation and the public health impact of EGMs in the Australasian context has resulted in significant media interest. He is very interested in the application of social theory as a perspective to develop better understanding of political processes and their relationship to public health policy in general and gambling policy in particular.

Charles co-convenes the annual Dangerous Consumptions colloquium, is an Editorial Board member of International Gambling Studies, and a member of the Australian Government's Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling.




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