About Dan
Opioid Industry Documents Archive Postdoctoral Fellow
Dan Kabella (they/them) is from New Mexico, the Southwest borderlands in the US. Dr. Kabella is an Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. They conduct research that enables scrutiny and analysis of the manifestation of place, race, and technology in the wider context of corporate and regulatory practice and are co-developing a community-driven archive with people on the front lines of the opioid overdose crisis while leveraging OIDA to address complex harms. Kabella received a doctorate in Human and Social Dimension of Science and Technology at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation. They are working on a book project that examines New Mexico as an experimental site for drug recovery futures by attending to waves of hegemonic experimentation in recovery science and medicine over the last 50 years, the strategies that multiply colonized communities have used to articulate alternative visions and the emergent relationship between place, colonization and innovation.
About Dan’s project
Drawing on the Opioid Industry Documents Archive and the this project will build a prototype and create opportunities for participation and creation of digital knowledge technologies that reflect the lived experiences of opioid crisis-impacted communities. The San Francisco Walgreens Litigation Documents frame opioid use disorder (OUD) and people with OUD as contributing to social disorder. We aim to understand the impacts of OUD and how it is created that way in litigation. Using mapping techniques and postcolonial and digital humanities theories, we will build a mapping prototype of opioid prescription distribution flows from “high prescribing” Walgreens pharmacies in Tenderloin. This preliminary work will inform a larger project aimed to accelerate non-governmental organization-led projects modeled on the proposed prototype to illuminate crisis intervention of frontline harm-reduction workers increasing life-saving services for drug users’ health. These (counter)mapping projects intend to challenge the spatial vision of San Francisco by hybridizing the opioid crisis and introducing multiple spatialities and temporalities of harm and care.