Episode 218

Drug Ethnographies with Danielle Kabella

Hooray! It's the first of our episodes highlighting the work of our 2022 Pass The Mic travel grant recipients! Danielle Kabella works with communities in New Mexico that have historically had a complex relationship with substance use, recovery, and the legal system. Danielle's work focuses on recovery efforts of the past 50 years as a way to understand the changing relationship between recovery science, medicine, and the power of a community to re-shape that relationship.

The Pass The Mic grant comes from listener support, and lets us fund travel and outreach trips for undergraduate and graduate students. To learn more, or to support the grant with a donation, head to thedirtpod.com/passthemic.

Find Danielle on Twitter @dmkabella

To learn more:

Drug Ethnographies

Michael Agar (1973) Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts

Philippe Bourgois (2003) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

& (2009) Righteous Dopefiend * is a photo essay

Angela Garcia (2010) The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Todd Meyer’s (2013) The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy

Kelly Knight (2015) Pregnant. Addicted. Poor

Helena Hansen (2018) Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries

& (2023) Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America

Natasha Schull (2014) Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas * sts focused

Nancy Campbell (2020) OD: Naloxone And The Politics Of Overdose *not an ethnography, but a history of technology and very STS focused



Harm Reduction & other Organizations Danielle works with:

Sonoran Prevention Works (AZ)

Casa de Salud (NM) * 1st ethnographic study with McNair Program

Trans Queer Pueblo (AZ) bringing access to HRT/ primary care for migrants, etc.

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.