Philippe Bourgois, PhD - Keynote Speaker

Philippe Bourgois is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities (Semel Institute/Department of Psychiatry) at UCLA. A proponent of a public anthropology, he brings rigorous qualitative methods and critical social science theory to bear on urgent social, public health, clinical problems. He has conducted participant-observation fieldwork in the US inner-city and Central America for over two decades focusing on social inequality, poverty, violence, incarceration, urban segregation, refugee/labor migration trauma, homelessness, substance use disorder, the global narcotics industry, psychosis and HIV. He has published over a dozen books, edited volumes, special issues of journals and well over 150 journal articles. His two best-known books are In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge, 1995) and Righteous Dopefiend (co-authored with Jeff Schonberg, University of California, 2009). Other volumes include, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins, 1989), Violence in War and Peace (Co-edited with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Blackwell 2004), and Violence at the Urban Margins (Co-edited with Javier Auyero and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Oxford 2015). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. His publications can be downloaded at: http://www.philippebourgois.net