Mauricio José Najarro

My research will wrestle and reckon with the uncertainties and indeterminacies of drugs in Punjab’a primary focus of state interventions as well as significant investments by state authorities, healthcare providers, public health advocates, and of course drug users. Attending and attuning to the biochemical poetics of molecules and memories, my research will answer the following questions: how is knowledge about addictions, drugs, and bodies produced and transformed by the work of journalists, psychiatrists, policymakers, politicians, religious authorities, culture and media professionals, and lay people? Rather than taking the notions of “addict,” “addiction,” and “drug” at face value, my research will examine the labor involved in constructing and propagating such shifting and relational terms thereby developing new anthropological ways of understanding the coproduction of subjects, objects, and injectables.