The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver
Speaker: Dr. Danya Fast
University of British Columbia | BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and Foundry
Abstract:
In local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be a ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly-manufactured fentanyl and related analogues in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, I explore these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis.
About Dr. Danya Fast
I am a medical anthropologist conducting research in Vancouver, Canada and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My work in these settings has broadly focused on understanding the relationship between health and place among young people who use drugs in the margins of the city. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Social Medicine) at UBC and a Faculty Associate of the Department of Anthropology. I am also a Research Scientist at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use, where I co-lead the Youth Health Research Program.
Photo Credit: Patty and Joe, 2013
