Sydney M Silverstein

The proposed project examines the treatment of opioid addiction in a U.S. city contending with high rates of overdose death. Specifically, this project examines a novel approach to addiction treatment’a ‘tech-enabled’ care ecosystem’to study how differing ontologies of addiction and forms of expertise are negotiated in the design and provision of care. By focusing on productive potential, but also destructive tensions, inherent in this approach, this project will illuminate how clinical practices of addiction treatment are being re-shaped by a burgeoning health-tech sector, and how notions of addiction, and how to care for it, are being remade in the wake of this multiplicity. In so doing, this research will expand anthropological understanding of addiction, care, and the mergers of health and tech in the contemporary United States.