Associate Professor Andrea M. Lopez is an invited participant in a Wenner-Gren funded workshop, "Towards developing an anthropologically inspired research agenda for the study of people who inject drugs." Wenner-Gren workshops are highly competitive funded projects that convene a select group of scholars to advance significant and innovative anthropological research. Small groups of scholars gather for several days to work intensively on particular themes.

For this workshop, a group of drug use/addiction scholars is convening over four days in May at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to "explore the theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges involved in conducting ethnographies of people who inject drugs (PWID). The workshop's main goal is to advance an anthropology-inspired research agenda for the study of PWID that systematizes and incorporates all current knowledge and projects it into the future. Topics include: drug markets and globalization; the nexus between the war on drugs, PWID, and the carceral state; migration; gender and power dynamics among PWID; disability and intravenous drug use; climate change and injection trajectories; employing ethnographic methods to further a critical epidemiology of intravenous drug use HIV/HCV and overdose risk; and the ethical and representational challenges of conducting fieldwork among PWID."