Faculty and Researchers with STS Interests - Profile

Philippe Bourgois
Professor, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine
University of California, San Francisco


Email: bourgois@dahsm.ucsf.edu

Philippe Bourgois is writing a book with the photographer Jeff Schonberg on the daily life of homeless heroin injectors based on ten years of participant ethnographic fieldwork in San Francisco, entitled Righteous Dopefiend. Funded as an HIV prevention initiative, the work critically engages epidemiological and public health approaches to drug research to develop a "theory of abuse" that links social structural power relations and disciplinary practices (including drug policy, public health, social services, law enforcement, neo-liberal labor markets, and domestic violence) to the everyday social suffering of indigent addicts. He is also continuing long-term work on the experience of violence (political, structural, symbolic and intimate) among former Salvadoran guerrilla fighters and their children who have migrated to California as undocumented day laborers.

Website: http://www.dahsm.medschool.ucsf.edu/faculty/bios/bourgois_philippe.aspx

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