Visualizing global drug flows : transnational connections to the overdose crisis in New England, USA

First, I filmed some of the thousands of commercial tractor trailers entering US ports of entry daily to explore how the ‚phantom™ illicit drug hides within the speed, rhythm, volume, and scale required by legal US-Mexico logistics industries. Secondly, I followed naloxone back to legal poppy agricultural farms in Tasmania, Australia to film farmers growing poppies from seed to harvest to explore the agential intra-activity between human and more than human worlds expressed in practices of agricultural care.

Losing A Whole Generation, a three-channel audio-visual installation within a living room set design visualizes the heterogenous affective, material and mobile connections between three distinct, distant life worlds: (1) community-based public health responses to drug overdoses in Massachusetts; (2) US-Mexico commercial trade at the Laredo, Texas port of entry; and (3) legal Tasmanian poppy farming. My PhD thesis demonstrates how documentary filmmaking is an exemplary method to develop new sites, senses and knowledge of international relations.