Book Launch of In Praise of Addiction: by Professor Elizabeth F. S. Roberts

CAMHRA warmly invites you to the UK launch of In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World by Professor Elizabeth F. S. Roberts.

Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.

In Praise of Addiction shares the unexpected journey that led Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.

Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.

We will provide light dinner and refreshments from 5.30pm till 6pm.

Biography

Prof Elizabeth F. S. Roberts is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who investigates scientific and public health knowledge production and its embodied effects in Latin America, where she focuses on a range of dynamic bodily processes, including chronic disease, chemical exposure, addiction and reproduction. Dr Roberts currently collaborates with engineers, environmental health scientists and economists to trace the looping social, economic, biological, and technical processes that shape everyday life, health, and inequality in working class neighborhoods in Mexico City.

One of the key aims of Professor Roberts’ current work is the development of bioethnography, a method that combines social and life sciences approaches in order to make better knowledge about health and inequality. Dr. Roberts is the author of In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World (Princeton University Press, 2026) and God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes (U.C. California Press 2012).

Chairs of the Conversation

Dr Naomi Leite and Dr Bhrigupati Singh 

Images (gallery): Princeton University Press

Image (banner): Codioful (formerly Gradienta), Unsplash