Sponsored by the Centre for Ethnography This book talk combines ethnography and memoir to make the case for reimagining addiction, both as lived experience and a diagnostic category. During ethnographic fieldwork on chemical exposure in Mexico City’s colonias populares, I encountered my neighbors defiantly celebrating their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. My neighbors lived their compulsive dependencies as inseparable from the afterlives of NAFTA and the drug war, which disrupted my own tacit assumptions about addiction as personal failure. Even more transformatively, my neighbors praised addiction. After a lifetime of struggling against my sister’s alcoholism, my mother’s hoarding, and my own binge eating, my neighbors taught me that addiction could be a binding force—one that can connect, sustain, and demand devotion with and for others. Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83667050920 Meeting ID: 836 6705 0920 Learn more about the event herehttps://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/anthropology/elizabeth-fs-roberts-book-talk-praise-addiction.