We are working on building a roster of our active members. To be included on this list, please send the following information to: adtstudygroup@gmail.com
Name, title, department, institution, short bio with research interests, contact information, and a picture.
Hilary Agro is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia. Her research is on recreational drug use in electronic music settings in Toronto, Ontario, exploring the way in which psychoactive substances are used in specific physical and cultural environments to produce socially mediated alternate states of consciousness. She is interested in harm reduction in conjunction with benefit enhancement, knowledge production, prohibition, governance, policy, gender, and political economy. Hilary is ADTSG’s Social Media Coordinator and a Contributing Editor to the journal Cultural Anthropology. Email: hagro@uwo.ca Twitter: @hilaryagro Brian is completing his MD at Stanford, with a scholarly concentration in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities. He holds a MSc in Biomedicine, Bioscience & Society from the London School of Economics. At the LSE Brian studied the non-prescription use of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers, and wrote a masters thesis “Classifying Ayahuasca: The Role of Subjective Experience in Psychiatric Research with Psychedelics”, which won the ADTSG 2011 Student Paper Prize. He has done ethnographic research on the Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions and published on this topic in collaboration with his colleagues at the Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre Psicoativos. Currently he is studying mutual-aid addiction treatment groups for Latinos in Mexico and the USA. Email: bta5ht@gmail.com Peter Benson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches courses on tobacco, global health, capitalism, and social theory. He is the author of Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry (2012, Princeton UP) and coauthor of Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala (2006, Stanford UP). He is also a past chair of the Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco Study Group. Email: pbenson@artsci.wustl.edu Marc G. Blainey was born in Toronto, Canada. He has a B.A. in anthropology (University of Western Ontario, 2005), an M.A. in archaeological anthropology (Trent University, 2007), and a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology (Tulane University, 2013). Previously, he conducted research concerning the shamanistic ingestion of entheogens by the ancient Maya culture. As a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto he conducted fieldwork and recorded interviews with European and North American members of the Santo Daime, a Brazil-based religion in which devotees drink ayahuasca as a psychoactive sacrament. More broadly, he is interested in the domains of Anthropology of Religion, Medical Anthropology, Cognitive Archaeology, and Consciousness Studies. Email: ethnometaphysics@gmail.com Philippe Bourgois is the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine. He has published a number of award-winning books and edited volumes including In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge, 1995) as well as Righteous Dopefiend (co-authored with Jeff Schonberg, University of California, 2009), Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins, 1989) and Violence in War and Peace (Co-edited with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Blackwell 2004). Currently, Philippe is the PI on a 14-year continuously renewed NIH R01 research grant, developing a risk-environment theory for HIV prevention and treatment useful for the US inner city. He also recently completed five years of NIH-funded HIV-prevention fieldwork (2007-2012) in the Puerto Rican inner city of Philadelphia. In 2013, he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative grant to work on his new book on North Philadelphia tentatively entitled, Cornered, about daily life in an impoverished de-industrialized US inner city neighborhood, overwhelmed by open-air heroin and cocaine markets. Email: bourgois@gmail.com Chiara Bresciani studied Management of Cultural Heritage, Anthropology curriculum (BA) and Anthropology (MA, cum laude) at the universities of Venice and Bologna, Italy. She has also completed an International Master in Inter-Mediterranean Mediation (MIM) in Italy and France and has worked in the communication industry. Since 2013, she is a PhD student at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University (Australia). She has worked on alcohol use in an Indigenous Huave village in Oaxaca State, Mexico, focusing on different patterns of alcohol consumption and on the religious healing of alcoholism. Her current research is a critical study of Huave agency and cultural heritage, and among her research interests there is the relationship between drunkenness and agency. As a part of her PhD, she plans to spend a period at the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research at Aarhus University. She is part of the Tropical Research Network (TRN), a collaborative network of eight Australian universities for multidisciplinary research in the Tropics, and of the Anthropological Laboratory for Tropical Audiovisual Research (ALTAR) at James Cook University. Email: chiara.bresciani1@gmail.com Breanne is in her junior year at Michigan State University pursuing a B.S. in Anthropology with a minor in Cognitive Science. For three years Breanne has worked as a research assistant on an anthropological project studying prescription stimulant use among college students. Post graduation in Spring 2017, Breanne hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology and is interested in studying addiction and drug use. Email: casperb1@msu.edu Tazin Daniels received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Michigan State University in 2016. She is interested in pharmaceutical culture, mental health, and performance enhancement in the United States. Her research is an ethnographic exploration of the social life of prescription stimulants, namely Adderall, as they are prescribed, exchanged, and repurposed as “study drugs” on a large U.S. campus. Email: tazdan@umich.edu Twitter: @PharmaCulture Santiago Ivan Guerra completed a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology with a thematic concentration in the Mexican American Borderlands Program and a Doctoral Portfolio in Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also been trained in the field of drug-related research by leading researchers from the National Hispanic Science Network on Drug Abuse. Santiago’s research background and teaching experience are in the fields of Social/Cultural Anthropology, Mexican American/Latino Studies and Southwest/Borderlands Studies. His research centers on the social construction of illegality, criminality and policing along the South Texas-Mexico Border. His dissertation, From Vaqueros to Mafiosos: A Community History of Drug Trafficking in Rural South Texas is an ethnographic study of the impact of the drug trade on a rural South Texas border community and received the Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2012 from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies-Tejas FOCO. To date his work has been supported by various funding sources, including the National Science Foundation, College of Liberal Arts and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies at Colorado College. Email: santiago.guerra@coloradocollege.edu Sugandh Gupta is doctoral student with a psychology background. For her doctoral research, Sugandh will work with youth in the Jammu district of India’s contested Jammu and Kashmir state. She will examine how political violence and changing socio-cultural realities in the region, set within the context of ongoing neoliberal state reforms in India, are shaping experiences of addiction and dependency among youth. Email: sugandh@live.unc.edu Shana Harris is a cultural and medical anthropologist who specializes in drug use and abuse and health politics and practice in Latin America and the United States. She received her Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco in 2012. She was a National Institutes of Health funded-Postdoctoral Fellow in the Behavioral Science Training in Drug Abuse Research Program at the National Development and Research Institutes in New York City from 2013 to 2015. Her dissertation and postdoctoral research ethnographically examined drug use and the politics of intervention related to harm reduction in Argentina. Her new project examines medical travel and the use of a psychedelic called ibogaine for drug treatment in Mexico. She currently serves as chair of ADTSG. Email: shana.harris@ucf.edu Lee’s research focuses on understanding the political, social, cultural, and clinical contexts related to illicit drug use. This work has informed a range of topics, including; HIV risk behaviors of drug injectors, diagnostic nosology for substance use disorders, understanding trends in drug use, as well as drug policy and intervention studies. More recently, Lee’s research examines how illicit drug markets, and the acquisition of drugs, influences users behaviors and negative health outcomes. Email: lee.hoffer@case.edu Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist, who has had 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the field of youth studies, youth cultures and drug and alcohol research. Currently Dr. Hunt is Professor at the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research (CRF) at the University of Aarhus and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis. Dr. Hunt is Principal Investigator on a National Institutes on Health project on Asian-American men who have sex with men (MSM). This project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse is a continuation project on the culture of drug use in the dance scene begun in 2002. This initial project also encompassed three comparative qualitative research projects in Hong Kong and Rotterdam. A book based on this research “Youth Drugs and Nightlife” was published in November 2009 by Routledge. In addition to these projects on clubs, drugs and the Nighttime Economy, Dr. Hunt and his team continue their work on youth gangs in the San Francisco Bay Area and are currently analyzing and writing up their research on gender and drug sales, a project also funded by the National Institute onDrug Abuse. Dr. Hunt has been involved in two large scale comparative international projects. The first project focused on the study of alcohol treatment systems in sixteen countries and led to the publication of the book: “Cure, Care or Control: Alcoholism Treatment in Sixteen Countries” (SUNY 1992). A companion volume: “Drugs, Demons and Delinquents: Drug Treatment Systems in an International Perspective” (Sage 1998) examined the drug treatment systems in twenty different countries. Most recently, Dr. Hunt, along with Dr. Milhet from the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) in Paris and Dr. Bergeron from Sciences Po also in Paris, edited the book “Drugs and Culture: Knowledge, Consumption and Policy” (Ashgate 2011). Email: huntgisa@ix.netcom.com Beatriz Caiuby Labate has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of psychoactive substances, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Visiting Professor at the Center for Research and Post Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), in Guadalajara, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Drug Policy Program of the Center for Economic Research and Education (CIDE), in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is also co-founder of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP), and editor of NEIP’s website (http://www.neip.info). She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twelve books, one special-edition journal, and several peer-reviewed articles. For more information, see: http://bialabate.net/ Juliet’s interests in alcohol, tobacco and drug studies include the social constructions of drugs and drug use; critique of methods; and ethnographic approaches to alcohol, tobacco and drug policies. She has since served as Principal or Co-Investigator on multiple research projects focusing on use and misuse of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs with NIH and California tobacco research (TRDRP) funding. These projects have utilized mixed methods designs and community-partnered approaches including Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), and community-based preventive interventions. Juliet received an MA in Asian Studies and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology based on research in nationalism and modernity in Indonesia, and post-doctoral training in Alcohol Studies as an NIAAA Post-Doctoral Fellow at PRC. Many of her articles are available for free via PubMed Email: jlee@prev.org Martha Lincoln is a cultural and medical anthropologist. She is interested in the social epidemiology of substance use and dependency, the influence of structural violence on patterns of substance circulation and consumption, the ascription of cultural meanings to substances, and the health, legal, and policy aspects of substance use. She received her PhD in Anthropology based on research regarding the political and social life of infectious disease outbreaks in Vietnam. Email: mlincoln@pire.org David Shane Lowry is an anthropologist trained at MIT (during and directly after the mapping of DNA) and UNC-Chapel Hill. One question guides most of his anthropological inquiries: “Why do humans heal?” David’s inquiries into drug use began during ten years of work in America’s pharmacies. He also gathered ethnographic knowledge of drug use during three years of fieldwork in Native American churches and soup kitchens in North Carolina. David is finishing up a book on the politics of drug preparation in America (currently under contract). The next phase of his research/writing will focus on the “body” within medical education. On the side, David is writing a book about America after Michael Jeffrey Jordan (the basketball player and global icon). Email: david.lowry@rosalindfranklin.edu Twitter and Instagram: @DavidShaneLowry Mac Marshall has worked in the subject area of ADTSG for >35 years. His initial focus was on alcohol and kava in the Pacific Islands, but over the years this expanded to include tobacco, betel, and marijuana. He has authored or edited several books on these subjects (e.g., 1979 Weekend Warriors: Alcohol in a Micronesian Culture; 1979 (ed.) Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages: A Cross-Cultural Survey; 1982 (ed.) Through a Glass Darkly: Beer and Modernization in Papua New Guinea; 1990 (with Leslie B. Marshall) Silent Voices Speak: Women and Prohibition in Truk; 1999 (ed. with Leanne Riley) Alcohol and Public Health in 8 Developing Countries; and now in press for 2013 Drinking Smoke: The Tobacco Syndemic in Oceania.) Mac has also published many book chapters and journal articles on alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. Most of his research has been in the Pacific Islands (particularly in Micronesia and Papua New Guinea), but Mac also conducted a 3-year study of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) that resulted in a couple of journal articles (1996 in Qualitative Health Research and 1994 in Journal of Public Health Policy, both co-authored with Alice Oleson). In an earlier era (1984-1989) Mac served as a member of the Board of Directors and as Newsletter Editor for what was then called the Alcohol & Drug Study Group (now ADTSG). From 1996-2002 he was the sole anthropologist on a 10-person international scientific research team sponsored by WHO’s Programme on Substance Abuse (the Alcohol Policy in Developing Societies Project; see Robin Room et al. 2002 Alcohol in Developing Societies: A Public Health Approach). Mac am presently on the editorial boards of Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse and The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Finally, he is also past editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Email macmarsh@sonic.net Stacey McKenna is a Research Assistant Professor at University of Colorado Denver in the Department of Health & Behavioral Sciences. She is currently a co-investigator on an NIH funded study of methamphetamine users’ drug acquisition and survival strategies in Northern Colorado. Using ethnography, discourse analysis, and mixed-methods collaborations, Stacey is interested in the study of drug use, homelessness, health, and survival in small urban and rural communities. Email: Stacey.Mckenna@ucdenver.edu Roland Moore conducts community research and qualitative data analysis, and has extensive fieldwork and management experience conducting NIAAA- and NCI-funded qualitative research on tobacco, alcohol and other drug use and work conditions among assembly plant workers, city and county employees, and hospitality industry workers. He has also served as ethnographer on three mixed-method studies of tobacco and alcohol use and health in military workplace settings. Currently, Roland is PI of a large collaborative intervention with colleagues at The Scripps Research Institute and Indian Health Council, Inc. to reduce the prevalence of underage drinking in and around nine rural Southern California Indian reservations. He currently serves as Vice-Chair of the ADTSG. Email: Roland@PREV.org Mark Nichter is Regents Professor and coordinator of the Graduate Medical Anthropology Training Program at the University of Arizona. His long term research interests include the study of pharmaceutical trials , marketing , prescription, consumption and adherence; drug use trends, pharmaceutical selves, , and factors favoring tobacco uptake, dependency, and cessation. Mark has carried out long term research in both South and Southeast Asia as well as the United states. He has served on Institute of Medicine committees on Tobacco and Youth in the USA, and the Use and Popularity of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, as well as the Robert Wood JohnsonTobacco Etiology Research Network. He currently serves on the Advisory Board, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program, and is PI of NIH funded Project Quit Tobacco International Email: NichterMark@Gmail.com Kristen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. For many years, she worked as a researcher with the Alaska Office of the Pacific Institute for Research & Evaluation (PIRE). She has managed three National Institutes of Health-funded studies in Alaska focused on substance misuse and risky behavior prevention and also served as a qualitative co-investigator in this research. Her primary interest is engaging in a critical dialogue with the expanding public health discourse on health disparities and social determinants of health in relation to substance misuse. Much of her work has sought to develop and test community-based approaches to the prevention of substance misuse, including inhalants and over-the-counter and prescription drugs, in rural Alaska. Recently, she has been examining the history, effectiveness, and unintended consequences of community local options restrictions on alcohol in Alaska. Raised in rural Arizona, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Arizona State University. Email: kaogilvie@uaa.alaska.edu Anna’s research interests include injecting drug use, hepatitis B and C, sexual and reproductive health, social inequalities of health and Indigenous health. Her theoretical background lies in the anthropology of health and illness, qualitative research methods and public health with a particular interest in illness discourse and thematic analysis. In her current role as a NHMRC post-doctoral fellow at the Kirby Institute Anna is working on the health needs of women living with chronic hepatitis C and pathways to monitoring and treatment for Aboriginal Australians living with chronic hepatitis B. Anna is also coordinating the evaluation of Australia’s first Naloxone (Narcan) distribution program. Email: aolsen@kirby.unsw.edu.au Dr Quintero is a broadly trained cultural anthropologist with expertise in the areas of applied anthropology, medical anthropology and Southwest ethnography. He has an active research agenda focusing on social, cultural and political economic aspects of drug use. The majority of his research has consisted of applied ethnographic studies of drug use, predominately with Hispanic and Native American populations in the Southwest as well as young adult populations in Western cultural settings in the United States. Email: gilbert.quintero@montana.edu Eugene Raikhel is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. He is particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. He is currently completing a manuscript based on my doctoral research, titled Governing Habits: Addiction and the Therapeutic Market in Contemporary Russia. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg among institutions dealing with substance abuse, this book examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and opiate addiction in Russia over the past twenty years. He is developing a North America-based project which will explore how research in neurobiology is shaping diagnostic and treatment technologies for addiction, with a particular focus on the consequences of these changes for patients. With William Garriott, he is editor of Addiction Trajectories (Duke University Press, 2013). Email: eraikhel@uchicago.edu Bob began working for the Institute for Human Development at Northern Arizona University in 1989 as a research specialist . From ca. 1980-2003 He worked as research specialist for the American Indian Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (AIRRTC), conducting research on the vocational rehabilitation of American Indians with Alcohol Dependance or Abuse, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or Fetal Alcohol Effects, as well as other matters. In connection with these projects, Bob conducted field trips to Dallas and Houston in Texas, Minneapolis, MN, and Indian Reservations in northern California, Washington State, Idaho, and Montana. He received training in Motivational Interviewing and other methods from the University of Arizona, the Arizona Practice Improvement Collaborative (Pacific Southwest Addiction Technology Transfer Center; the name has changed several times), for which he also served on the Advisory Board. Bob became interested in substance abuse issues, including the cultural factors surrounding it, because these were major factors in vocational rehabilitation, and attention on these issues was wanted and needed. The cultural factors were of particular interest to him because of his background in Anthropology. Email: Robert.Schacht@nau.edu James F. Thrasher, PhD, is an anthropologist, behavioral scientist, and communications specialist who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior at the University of South Carolina and a Researcher and Visiting Professor at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health. Much of Dr. Thrasher’s current research examines the intersection of media, policy and tobacco use across a variety of countries and population segments, particularly in the Americas. This focus aims to illuminate which tobacco control intervention strategies are effective across socio-cultural settings and includes research on media content, media effects, and the development and evaluation of social marketing campaigns and media advocacy efforts to promote tobacco control policies. Dr. Thrasher has recently expanded his research to include nutrition labeling policies and advocacy campaigns to reduce obesity. Email: thrasher@mailbox.sc.edu
