Roberto Abadie

As it was forty years ago with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, today, our discipline is again confronted with theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges stemming from a drug overdose epidemic that demands both careful reflection and decisive action. Acting to contribute to minimizing or alleviating the suffering of poor, marginalized, and racialized PWID is an ethical imperative. To address these issues, we propose a workshop to explore the theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges involved in conducting ethnographies of PWID. The workshop’s main goal is to advance an anthropology-inspired research agenda for the study of PWID that systematizes and incorporates all current knowledge and projects it into the future. While we recognize that the workshop structure will change, this proposal advances a series of issues to structure the conversations and ensure that the conference’s goals will be met: drug markets and globalization; the nexus between the war on drugs, PWID, and the carceral state; migration; gender and power dynamics among PWID; disability and intravenous drug use; climate change and injection trajectories; employing ethnographic methods to further a critical epidemiology of intravenous drug use HIV/HCV and overdose risk; and the ethical and representational challenges of conducting fieldwork among PWID.