David Showalter (Berkeley PhD 2022) was awarded the ASA dissertation award for "Going Nowhere: The Social Life of Opioids in Backcountry California."
Showalter's dissertation investigates the opioid crisis in California’s mountainous backcountry in order to understand the spread of opioids to a region which lacks an organized drug market, and where opioid users tend to live alongside the authorities that police them. Showalter’s dissertation uncovers the social life of opioids, both in terms of how isolation and scarcity affect the health consequences of opioid use in remote parts of the United States, and also how the intimate and dense relations between users and law enforcement officers in these small towns affects how drugs are policed.
Showalter is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.