Tehseen is excited to begin a year-long postdoctoral research fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in the US! The funding comes from the US NIDA-funded Drug Dependence Epidemiology Training Program. Hopefully the year will be one of learning how to speak to/with the distinct languages of drug epidemiology and pharmacology, as well as the onto-epistemo-methodological challenges to how we think about social issues engendered by population-level thinking in public health and the collapse (or not?) of the nature-culture divide in the rapidly growing field of environmental epigenetics.

As viewers of the HBO series, The Wire might know, the vibrant city Baltimore is infamous for heroin. This could provide an interesting setting for a participatory research project bringing experts together to co-produce new lines of inquiry around heroin, for instance: explore what it does, how it affects bodies and lives, and what marks it leaves on/in the body, mind and population.

Tehseen will also be spending evenings with Mister Boh, eating blue crabs and earning a basic qualification in breakbeats.

Throughout the first week of September the ARN is publishing articles on OpenDemocracy.net  - drawing from the participation project. Visit our OpenDemocracy page here.