What is the street youth community? A five year ethnography of place with young people who use drugs on the streets of Vancouver

Abstract:

The language of community is ubiquitous in academic, public health and policy discourse about drug using populations. Yet, it has been argued that in some settings, the parameters of ‘the drug user community’ are far from self-evident. Based on four years of ethnographic research in Greater Vancouver, in this presentation Danya Fast explores experiences and understandings of a ‘drug user community’ (sometimes referred to more specifically as a ‘street youth community’) among a group of young people entrenched in Vancouver's street-based drug scene. She argues that it is important to critically examine our assumptions about the nature of inner-city drug user or street youth communities, in order to better understand young people’s needs and desires in these settings.

Speaker: Danya Fast

Danya Fast is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program at the University of British Columbia and Youth Ethnographic Research Coordinator at the Urban Health Research Initiative of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. She has a master's degree in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, and has worked previously in Tanzania and Vietnam. Danya received a New Investigators Award from the Canadian Association for HIV Research for her work exploring young people's experiences with drug use and violence in the context of the downtown Vancouver drug scene. Her current project, "Place and experiences of risk among young drug users in Greater Vancouver," is supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Trainee Award, and a University of British Columbia Four-Year Fellowship.

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