Laughter and Dreaming of Wins in Recovery
“Hannah, roll a six!,” Mahad, Alliance Wellness recovery program resident, pleaded as the game of Ludo intensified. Ludo, a strategic and competitive board game, was popular among Somali…
Tag: addiction
Policing Patients – review
In Policing Patients, Elizabeth Chiarello examines the role of prescription drug monitoring programmes (PDMPs) in the opioid crisis in the US, arguing that they transform healthcare into patient…
Section 144: Fieldwork in a Curfew
Reflecting on the complexities of conducting research in a region gripped by administrative upheaval and political uncertainty, I write to open up this forum to fellow anthropologists and…
Against Better Judgment – review
Anthropologists have often explained human behaviour as though people predictably act in their own interests. But in Against Better Judgment, Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H. A. Evans compile researc…
Anthropology of a Dream: The Stakes of Studying Addiction in America
In America, the desire for a dream echoes in personal, popular, and political narratives like a refrain promising inevitable progress. I regard addiction as the mirror of this…
Nick Bartlett on his book, Recovering Histories
Interview with Yun Chen https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520344136/recovering-histories Yun Chen: Recovering Histories is an ethnography of the entanglements between individuals’ lived expe…
In the Journals – Incarceration, Rehabilitation, and Recidivism
Josh Shapiro: Fair Commutation Not Mass Incarceration by joepiette2 via creativecommons Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed…
Needles to needles: how ear acupuncture can work for substance use recovery by Eana Meng
Helen was telling me about her day while I poured tea. Suddenly, the double doors swung open and a middle-aged man in a worn grey jacket briskly walked…
Memory / Habit / Addiction: Workshop Report by the Neuroscience and Society Network by Tara Mahfoud
INTRODUCTION The Neuroscience and Society Network, based at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM), organised a workshop titled “Memory / Habit / Addiction” on 28…
“The Hostel saved me, really” – addiction and homelessness under Covid-19 by Johannes Lenhard
When I did my second shift of volunteering at the Hostel[1], new rules were already in place: ‘stay-at-home’ orders had been issued and were enforceable (if not necessarily e…
Pushing boundaries: Homelessness and addiction during Covid-19
“Ben really isn’t keeping up well. He looks fine, but he’s been complaining and he’s constantly out. […] You don’t see a change with everyone, but with him…
Our COVID Museum: Notes from Physician-Anthropologists on the Frontlines of an Evolving Pandemic in Seattle and New York City by Kimberly Sue
As the pandemic of SARS-CoV2 (the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19) unfolds it continues to impact contemporary forms of sociality and community, health, care, governance, and global interconne…
Dark Patterns, or Shades of Grey?
Screen Time app. Credit: Apple Press Kit Auto-playing videos. Bottomless social media newsfeeds. Accentuated “I consent” buttons. The internet may appear as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but…
Video Games, Mental Health, and the Complicated Nature of Playing
Young man plays Fortnite at a gaming competition CC BY-SA 4.0 He melted into the shadows, pressing the ‘E’ key on his keyboard, activating his stealth skill, allowing…
Web Roundup: Annals of Injury and Dispossession by Talia Gordon
In a 2013 essay in American Anthropologist, Andrea Muehlebach summarized the concept of “precarity” as “a shorthand for…the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age…
Web Roundup: Women, Withdrawal, and Antidepressants by Katherine Warren
In April, an article in the New York Times caused a stir with the headline, “Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.” The piece begins with a…
Web Roundup: Opioids as a National Emergency by Katherine Warren
After several years in the headlines, the U.S. opioid crisis has been in the news this summer as the federal government debates its status as a national emergency.…
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus, Week 29: Courtney Morris For Black Boys Who Look Blue
The editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to continue an ongoing series The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressin…
Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios: A conference report by Danya Glabau
How does the financialization of life itself figure as a new means of producing value in modern technoscience? That is the question that motivated Kirk Fiereck to convene…
Turning cool kids into outlaws – Legal #fictions and the management of heroin abuse in post-reform China
Cool kids. On a rainy afternoon towards the end of my fieldwork in Qilin, southwest China, I sat with one of my informants, Jiao Hua – a round,…
Kelly Ray Knight’s addicted.pregnant.poor by Kirsten Bell
addicted.pregnant.poor By Kelly Ray Knight Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. …
Pharmaceutical Prosthesis and White Racial Rescue in the Prescription Opioid “Epidemic” by Helena Hansen
Introduction A U.S. public discourse of addiction as a disabling psychiatric condition (as opposed to a moral flaw or social deviancy) was codified into Social Security policy in…
The Addiction Algorithm: An interview with Natasha Dow Schüll
EM: Can you tell me a little bit about your book? NDS: I was in the first cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar postdoctoral program.…