DescriptionThis project seeks to reveal and dismantle the many consolidations of power (racial, capital, ethical, affective) that structure and vitalize systems of clinical care in the U.S., both currently and historically. Attending to such consolidations of power exposes the ways in which individual harm and collective crisis function as forms of currency and value in U.S. clinical medicine today. These forms of currency and value are differentially distributed depending on one’s proper relation to the state and to key markers of difference—race in particular. As such, the contemporary sphere of U.S. opioid politics serves as a key backdrop for theorizing racial difference generally and whiteness more specifically as specific kinds of clinical and cultural capital in current systems of care. By examining U.S. opioid politics alongside three keywords – Pain, Crisis, and Recovery—this project ultimately seeks to track the ways in which available mechanisms for recognizing and responding to the supposed “fact” of pain in U.S. clinical medicine have resulted in the un-even enfolding of white bodies into the protective structures of the clinic under false promises of endless re-capacitation, while communities and bodies of color are systematically denied such access. Ethnographic research with participatory, peer-to-peer recovery communities in Franklin County, Massachusetts demonstrates vital alternatives for theorizing and enacting care otherwise by centering those who have largely been excised from institutional and state protection in the work of community-directed healing. Ultimately, this project argues that only by coming to terms with—and by becoming accountable to—the histories of violence and extraction that vitalize and securitize bodies of U.S. clinical power will we be able to imagine and then generate other systems and praxes of well-being and of care moving forward.