Knowledge Bank

This study is an ethnography of the grassroots harm reduction movement in Ohio, utilizing qualitative interviews and quantitative spatial analysis to explore normative practices, ideologies, and patterns of activity within networks of community providers of care responding to the overdose epidemic. I employ a framework of "radical care," a concept originating within Black and brown organizing contexts and theorized by feminist geographers, to describe how grassroots harm reduction practice transcends mere delivery of resources to build an alternative to neoliberal systems of care for people who use drugs. Furthermore, placing the praxis of disability and housing rights movements in conversation with harm reduction highlights the potential for coalition-building toward a more compassionate future. By centering the embodied experiences of grassroots and underground providers, I frame their practices of radical care as not only a response to an urgent health crisis but also as resistances to structural violence and a means of reclaiming agency for PWUD and providers themselves.