Philippe Bourgois
Philippe Bourgois
Distinguished Professor-in-Residence
Office: B7-435 Semel Institute
Email: bourgois@ucla.edu
Phone: 310-267-4267
Biography
Philippe was Professor and Chair of Anthropology at San Francisco State University in the 1990s and founding Chair of Social Medicine at UCSF from 1998 to 2005. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania as the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Community Medicine. He started the formal MSTP MD/PhD tracks in Anthropology at both UCSF and the University of Pennsylvania. Philippe is currently working with Joel Braslow, the Director of UCLA’s MSTP track in the Social Sciences and the Coordinator of the Social Medicine and Humanities initiative in the David Geffen School of Medicine, to grow the increasingly vibrant intellectual community of Clinician-Social Scientists on campus.
Philippe was Professor and Chair of Anthropology at San Francisco State University in the 1990s and founding Chair of Social Medicine at UCSF from 1998 to 2005. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania as the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Community Medicine. He started the formal MSTP MD/PhD tracks in Anthropology at both UCSF and the University of Pennsylvania. Philippe is currently working with Joel Braslow, the Director of UCLA’s MSTP track in the Social Sciences and the Coordinator of the Social Medicine and Humanities initiative in the David Geffen School of Medicine, to grow the increasingly vibrant intellectual community of Clinician-Social Scientists on campus. We are in the early stages of building an exciting consortium with the Social Science tracks of the MD/PhD programs at other UC campuses which we hope to eventually extend to other institutions across the country.
Philippe is the author of several books and edited volumes, including the multiple award winning In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge, 1995), 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), 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 has published over 150 articles in medical anthropology, public health, and the humanities.
His fieldwork began in Central America in 1979 (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama) documenting the revolutionary movements and political repression of the early to mid 1980s. Since 1985 his primary fieldwork has been in the US inner city (East Harlem 1985-1981, San Francisco homeless 1995-2007, Puerto Rican North Philadelphia 2007-2015). He has been the Principal Investigator on a National Institutes of Health grant examining the HIV risk environment of indigent drug users that has continuously funded since 1996.
Research
Philippe is currently co-authoring Cornered (on contract with Princeton University Press), analyzing the carceral and psychiatric management of US urban poverty and segregation. We are building a theory of the “US inner-city health risk environment” working with the concepts of “structural vulnerability” and “primitive accumulation”. The book draws on a half dozen years of team-based participant-observation fieldwork (with Laurie Hart, George Karandinos and Fernando Montero) in the open air narcotics markets dominating Philadelphia’s deindustrialized inner-city heartland – the poorest section of its hyper-segregated Puerto Rican “ghetto”.
He is also leading the ethnographic component of the Center for Social Medicine’s new initiative documenting the interface between mental illness, poverty, incarceration, homelessness and racism in Los Angeles. We are developing a multi-methods collaborative team project with academics, service providers and community-based organizations and stake-holders that integrates quantitative, clinical, psychoanalytic and qualitative methods. The goal is to bring critical theoretical insights from the social sciences and humanities to bear practically on the urgent challenges of mental illness, social inequality, and racialized segregation in our city.
Publications
1. Philippe Bourgois, Seth Holmes, Kim Sue, and James Quesada. 2016. “Structural Vulnerability: Operationalizing the Concept to Address Health Disparities in Clinical Care.” Academic Medicine In Press: 11pp.
2. Ciccarone D, Bourgois P. 2016. “HIV, cocaine and collinearity in the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada .” International Journal of Drug Policy. In Press
3. Mars S, Bourgois P, Karandinos G, Montero F, Ciccarone D. 2016. “The Textures of Heroin: Users Perspectives…” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. In Press.
4. Auyero, J, Bourgois P, Scheper-Hughes N. Editors. 2015. Violence at the Urban Margins. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Bourgois P 2015. “Insecurity, the War on Drugs, and Crimes of the State: Symbolic Violence in the Americas.” In: Violence at the Urban Margins. Editors, Auyero, J, Bourgois P, Scheper-Hughes N eds. Pp. 305-321. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Mars SG, Fessel J, Bourgois P, Montero F, Karandinos G, Ciccarone D. 2015. “Heroin-related overdose” Social Science and Medicine. 140:44-53.
