Anthropology Colloquium Series - Lauren Textor

Event details Date: Monday, September 14, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM Location: Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience (MCB) - 102 - 1002 West Childs Way Los Angeles, CA, 90089 Cost: FREE Type: Lecture / Talk / Workshop Campus: University Park Campus Department: Anthropology Audience: Students, Alumni, Faculty/Staff About this event LAUREN TEXTOR Physician, Ethnographer, Anthropologist WHAT’S THE “HOLD” UP? After decades of criminalization within the context of the U.S. War on Drugs, outpatient medications for opioid use disorder represent an ideological shift and are celebrated as a non-carceral and liberatory solution to addiction. Despite political support for medicalization, such medications have been unequally distributed and experienced across geographic settings and populations. Drawing on my interlocutor’s description of one medicine's “hold,” I interrogate how medications' symbolic and pharmacological power to embrace, restrain, and otherwise “hold” people arises through their social context. “Holding” is a patient-driven epistemology, working metaphorically and neurochemically to illustrate raced, classed, and gendered positionalities that simultaneously express and constrain forms of agency and resistance in ideological struggles over the meanings of care in addiction treatment. Embodied knowledge becomes a site of ideological struggle against carceral biomedicine. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's theorization of neurochemical effects of state violence, I ask how a medication's “hold,” or lack thereof, can reveal intensities of carceral forms of “care” and possibilities for transforming addiction treatment. Lauren Textor holds a PhD in anthropology and an MD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently a resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA. Official event details: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/anthropology-colloquium-series-lauren-textor