Righteous Dopefiend

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain discussions of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and child abuse, racism, and anti-gay bias.

The introduction to Righteous Dopefiend explains the researchers’ approaches to working with their interlocutors and the theoretical framework of their analysis. They are working with unhoused people, many of whom deal with substance addiction. Most interview subjects are men over 40 living in a dilapidated warehouse district named Edgewater.

The introduction addresses the complicated ethics of relationships between researchers and their marginalized research participants. Navigating the moral economy that exists in the community they are studying, Bourgois and Schonberg tried to make their research ethical by integrating into the community and approaching their interlocutors with dignity and without judgment. The researchers’ goal is to explore the large-scale institutions and systems that contribute to the marginalization of these individuals, “the human cost of neoliberalism in the twentieth century” (9).

There are advantages and disadvantages to the use of photography: Ideally, photography allows readers to understand the position of the research subjects without turning their suffering into a spectacle.

Bourgois and Schonberg base their analysis of abuse, violence, and suffering in the