Philippe Bourgois, Ph.D.
Philippe Bourgois is the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family & Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of over 150 articles on drugs, violence, labor migration, ethnic conflict and urban poverty, as well as several books and volumes, including the multiple award-winning In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (C. Wright Mills and Margaret Mead Awards), and an edited volume with Nancy Scheper-Hughes Violence in War and Peace. He also studied ethnic relations in Central America, publishing Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation in 1989. In May, 2009 he published Righteous Dopefiend, a photo-ethnography (co-authored with Jeff Schonberg) that documents a community of homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers in San Francisco and provides a theoretical and practical critique of the ways U.S. neo-liberal policies have brutalized the urban poor in the 2000s. He has been funded by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 1988 and has been the Principal Investigator of an ongoing R01 grant (“The Logics for HIV Risk Among Street-Based Heroin Injectors”) since 1996. He is currently conducting participant-observation fieldwork in North Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community.