Emilia Rose Orsted Holmbeck

This project explores peer-support running/walking as a therapeutic modality in the treatment of substance use disorder (SUD) in Los Angeles. Existing research has variously conceptualized substance abuse as moral failing, neurobiological disorder, criminal act, or symptomatic of structural inequalities. Yet, the medical model of SUD as a chronic, uncontrolled compulsion to consume drugs remains the standard view in treatment which consequently intervenes at the level of the individual’s body/brain. Social scientists have critiqued such individual-centric approaches for eliding broader sociocultural, material, and institutional factors impacting substance ab/use. Recognizing the saliency of individual, embodied experiences of addiction, and that substance dependent individuals are also, always, embedded in and affected by social relationships, this project investigates an intervention targeting both the addicted body and social exigencies of recovery. By participating in the process as a running coach to individuals in SUD treatment through a local nonprofit, I explore peer-supported exercise as both individual and collective modes of coping and caregiving. Through participant observation and phenomenological methodologies, I investigate how embodied and intersubjective experiences of running/walking alongside others inform individuals’ understandings of themselves and their addictions and recoveries, situating these experiences through person-centered interviewing in individuals’ life histories, salient concerns, and imagined futures.