Home

Philippe Bourgois (PhD Anthropology) is a cultural and medical anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in Central America (Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Belize), the borderland metroplex of Tijuana--Mexico/San Diego, USA, as well as segregated, low-income U.S. inner-cities (East Harlem--New York, San Francisco, North Philadelphia/Kensington and Los Angeles). In Central America his research addresses the political mobilization of ethnicity, immigration, labor relations, authoritarian repressive and utopian revolutionary conflict. In the United States he focuses on the political economy of U.S. inner-city apartheid the relationship between intimate violence and political/structural violence and the carceral and psychiatric “necro-governance” of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and mental illness and substance use disorders. A proponent of “public anthropology," he brings critical political economic social science theory to bear on urgent social problems to advance theoretical and practical understandings of the interface between structural vulnerability, the social determinants of health and power. Ethnographically he documents how the “toxicities” of social inequality manifest in individual experiences of social suffering to translate social medicine theory into upstream policy reforms and frontline medical/public health interventions for clinicians and social service providers.

Currently Bourgois is publishing on incarceration, substance abuse, violence, homelessness, mental illness and HIV-prevention. With Laurie Hart-UCLA, George Karandinos-Harvard, Fernando Montero-Columbia he is co-authoring a book entitled "Cornered" (under contract with Princeton University Press) based on almost a dozen years of collaborative participant-observation fieldwork in the violently-policed, segregated low-incomePuerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia dominated by de-industrialization, real estate speculation and open-air narcotics markets (currently beset by fentanyl/xylazine, methamphetamine and cocaine).

With colleagues at the Center for Social Medicine at UCLA Bourgois is focusing on the crisis in U.S. mental healthcare which propels people with psychosis into chronic cycles of homelessness, substance use disorders and incarceration. He is volunteering in the LA County Jail, documenting unmet need for mental health services and the expansion of a remarkable Sheriff’s Department peer support program staffed by former gang members facing murder charges providing social accompaniment to the thousands of inmates with psychosis to reduce their distress and social isolation as well as promote pro-social behaviors. Bourgois has been the Principal Investigator on dozens of National Institutes of Health grants since 1996 including a 21-year continuous study of the inner-city HIV risk environment faced by indigent, street-based narcotics users and sellers. He is dedicated to fomenting a more productive dialogue between qualitative, epidemiological and clinical approaches to a critical understanding of the social determinants of health and quality of life so as to promote upstream reforms and immediate emergency care and services interventions benefiting larger numbers of “structurally vulnerable” underserved/overincarcerated populations.