Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Picketing, lanterns, and everyday resistance: Confronting gendered inequalities and state policies in Central Appalachia
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Opiates are increasingly associated with overdose deaths, hepatitis C, and HIV in the US, including Central Appalachia. Appalachian service providers and community leaders connect opiate use with socioeconomic inequalities and barriers to appropriate health care. Policy makers have responded to substance abuse with a number of initiatives that range from criminalizing drug users to providing treatment and additional services. Yet there is a dearth of published studies on how these initiatives are translated into people’s lives and how local communities are responding to substance use. The aim of this presentation is to discuss how women in recovery and key informants who work closely with substance use navigate their communities’ political and economic environments as well as the confines of government drug policies. These results are based on ethnographic fieldwork completed from 2013 to 2016 in rural Central Appalachia. Women processing through substance abuse treatment and key informants, including clinicians, researchers, and program administrators, are interviewed. Both women in treatment and key informants utilize a variety of tools to confront and navigate the gendered inequalities, economic extremes, and state policies that situate women’s experiences with substance use and treatment. Participants are involved in political activism to increase economic opportunities, restore felon rights, and make harm reduction services for substance users available. Women and their supporters create spaces for those in recovery and misusers to vent their grief and frustrations and to find community. Participants also find less obvious methods of subverting socioeconomic inequalities and hiding themselves and their families from state programs that they view as intrusive and punitive.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Lesly-Marie Buer, MA, MPH, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and holds a graduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Kentucky. Her primary research interests include women’s health, substance use, and women’s lived experiences in Appalachia. Her current dissertation research focuses on women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment, state interventions, and gendered inequalities in Central Appalachia.
Picketing, lanterns, and everyday resistance: Confronting gendered inequalities and state policies in Central Appalachia
Opiates are increasingly associated with overdose deaths, hepatitis C, and HIV in the US, including Central Appalachia. Appalachian service providers and community leaders connect opiate use with socioeconomic inequalities and barriers to appropriate health care. Policy makers have responded to substance abuse with a number of initiatives that range from criminalizing drug users to providing treatment and additional services. Yet there is a dearth of published studies on how these initiatives are translated into people’s lives and how local communities are responding to substance use. The aim of this presentation is to discuss how women in recovery and key informants who work closely with substance use navigate their communities’ political and economic environments as well as the confines of government drug policies. These results are based on ethnographic fieldwork completed from 2013 to 2016 in rural Central Appalachia. Women processing through substance abuse treatment and key informants, including clinicians, researchers, and program administrators, are interviewed. Both women in treatment and key informants utilize a variety of tools to confront and navigate the gendered inequalities, economic extremes, and state policies that situate women’s experiences with substance use and treatment. Participants are involved in political activism to increase economic opportunities, restore felon rights, and make harm reduction services for substance users available. Women and their supporters create spaces for those in recovery and misusers to vent their grief and frustrations and to find community. Participants also find less obvious methods of subverting socioeconomic inequalities and hiding themselves and their families from state programs that they view as intrusive and punitive.
