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Short abstract:

This paper examines the production of (non)bodily injuries and the doing of "trauma work" amidst the toxic drug supply crisis. I critique the limits of thinking with "repair" in the context of the war on drugs, turning instead to the technoscientific activisms and tools of harm reductionists.

Long abstract:

Expanding on critical race, queer, and feminist engagements with trauma (Burstow, 2003; Crimp, 2002; Cvetkovich, 2003; Jaleel, 2021; Stevens, 2016), this paper attends to the blurring of "injury" and "repair" in the context of the toxic drug supply crisis and explores how mental and bodily injuries are made visible and socially meaningful in the era of overdose. This paper firstly examines how injury and repair have been conceptualised in trauma-informed policy and practice, tracing a modern genealogy of “trauma-informed care” in the U.S., from the co-emergence of trauma and addiction sciences in the 1970s to contemporary figurations of injury/repair in therapeutic frameworks. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Los Angeles, California, this paper then discusses how front-line harm reduction advocates and activists, peer workers, and people who use drugs sense, engage with and endure traumatic affect in their everyday organising and outreach work. Re-theorising “trauma work” as relational, I show how mental and psychic injuries, including vicarious trauma, burnout, and chronic loss, operate as diffusive categories and emerge from bureaucratic negotiations with county and state bodies that resource clinical repair, such as occupational health boards. Taking into consideration what Jaleel (2021) calls the “impossibility of repair,” this paper further suggests that technoscientific interventions like naloxone can engender new affective and embodied cultures of healing (p.47). I argue that ideas of re-animation (Campbell, 2020), made possible by such technologies, present alternatives to repair, instead demanding the collective liberation of the social body from the war on drugs.