BioSocial Futures: Toward a Community Ecology of Health

This talk is based on over a decade of participant observation in the field of Translational Social Science and the use of social technologies in relation to health inequalities. It provides a case study in the author’s research on race and the development and marketing of new opioids that led to the contemporary opioid crisis. The study of opioids revealed "technologies of whiteness" - neuroscience, new biotechnology development, regulation and marketing - that explain the racial symbolism and demographics of opioid use. The talk ends by interrogating the magic bullet ideology underlying the persistent lack of investment in social and structural determinants of health equity, including the biomedicalization of addiction in the era of white opioids, while offering approaches – from “structural competency” to BioSocial research and community ecological medicine – to addressing the institutional and policy drivers of the overdose crisis.