Drawing on six years of ethnographic engagement with people who use drugs in San Francisco, Brothers has woven together an empirical and theoretical contribution to STS particularly around trust and expertise, namely bodily risk and uncredentialed expertise. The paper is written with an authoritative medical voice which brings an understanding of street injection to another set of expert readers. The paper makes a further contribution to the relation of gendered bodies—whose body injects another and is unflinching in its descriptions. It’s interesting how the author includes different perceptions and valorisations of particular practices, that can open up new categories of expertise. Brothers utilizes an approachable writing style to actively engage the reader in an otherwise complicated subject matter, reshaping our understanding of street drugs in society and the implications relevant to urban marginality concurrent beyond the US.
We thank the Mullins Prize Committee, including Amanda Windle (Chair), Gloria Baigorrotegui, and Bryn Seabrook, for their hard work.
I am honored to receive the 2021 Nicholas C. Mullins Award for my article, A Good Doctor is Hard to Find: Assessing Uncredentialed Expertise in Assisted Injection, published in Social Science and Medicine. I am deeply grateful for the generous feedback I received from Rene Almeling, Marcia Inhorn, Robert Heimer, Loïc Wacquant, Jess Lin, the Yale Medical Anthropology Research Group, the Yale Comparative Research Workshop, and the editors and peer-reviewers at Social Science and Medicine. I am also thankful to the 4S organization for their support for graduate student research and for providing the space to discuss this project. Finally, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the people who participated in the study and generously shared their time, thoughts, and experiences with me.
Sarah Brothers is assistant professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Pennsylvania State University. She recently completed her doctorate in Sociology at Yale University. Her research focuses on how vulnerable groups experience and respond to health-related issues. In her dissertation research, she examines the construction, performance, and assessment of uncredentialed expertise in assisted injection, a high-risk and common practice in which one person injects another with illicit drugs. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the P.E.O Scholars Award, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies, and others.