This talk examines the carceral and psychiatric mismanagement of inner city poverty and addiction. Drawing on photo-ethnographic data from five years of participant-observation fieldwork in the poorest corner of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican inner city, it documents the high levels of violence and rage imposed on a hypersegregated neighborhood that has become an open air retail-level narcotics distribution platform. This highly profitable endpoint niche condemns its customers and employees to lives of chronic incarceration and premature death from addiction and physical assaults.

The state's intervention through massive expenses on the War on Drugs, criminal justice repression and psychiatrically-mediated health and social service treatments/entitlements further foments subjectivities of rage, addiction and disability. This ironically elevates the artificial profitability of addiction markets while simultaneously mobilising infrastructures of state-subsidised resources for a diverse array of special interest groups: ranging from drug dons and criminal lawyers to prison guard/police unions, carceral construction and services firms, social service and medical providers, and even big Pharma. Critically invoking the 19th-century classic political economy concept of primitive accumulation, the extreme forms of brutalising hyper-accumulation we are documenting in the US inner city may be a precursor for global processes that are wreaking havoc among vulnerable increasingly lumpenized populations across the globe.

About the Speaker:

Philippe Bourgois, PhD is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Semel Institute of the Department of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (Formerly the founding chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School and a Programs in Interdisciplinary Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.).

A proponent of a public anthropology that brings critical social science theory to bear on urgent social problems, he was elected to the American Academy of Sciences in 2018 for his long-term ethnographic research on US inner-city poverty, segregation, violence, incarceration, labour migration, homelessness, substance use disorder, and HIV. He has published well over 150 journal articles and over a dozen books, edited volumes, and special issues of journals, including the award-winning academic best sellers In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge, 1995) and Righteous Dopefiend (co-authored with Jeff Schonberg, University of California, 2009). He is currently co-authoring a book on the carceral and psychiatric mismanagement of inner city poverty, entitled Cornered, for Princeton University Press with Laurie Hart, George Karandinos and Fernando Montero.