Utopia in practice for addiction recovery: Centering lived experience and advancing epistemic justice for minoritised ethnic groups in England

Background Treatment and recovery systems do not engage all populations equally, and dominant explanations focused on access, engagement or retention overlook deeper structural and epistemic dynamics that limit recognition of lived experience among minoritised ethnic communities.Methods This article advances utopia in practice as both a conceptual and methodological approach, integrating Levitas’s triadic functions of utopia (critique, compensation, transformation) with Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice (testimonial and hermeneutical). The study draws on two co-produced, community-led engagement events with 55 participants from minoritised ethnic recovery communities in England. Using a reflexive thematic analysis of group dialogue, the study centers collective lived experience as both data and analytical authority.Results Participants accounts revealed a coexisting dynamic of critique, community-led compensatory practices, and proposals for change. Together, these findings demonstrate that recovery knowledge and care are being generated within lived experience communities and negotiated through culturally and relationally embedded relationships.Conclusion Utopia in practice reframes lived experience as both diagnostic and generative challenging dominant framings of minoritised ethnic communities as underserved, instead highlighting their role as producers of recovery knowledge and creators of more epistemically just approaches to recovery, where lived experience informs how systems are understood and developed.