Annie Spencer
Annie Spencer is a doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center where she studies economic geography. She is writing a dissertation on the present-day heroin crisis in the United States in the context of post-industrial economic restructuring. Spencer holds an M.A. in International Trade, Investment and Development Policy from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and has taught undergraduate and MA-level courses in economics, economic geography, and cultural studies at Bates College, the University of Southern Maine, and Hunter College, CUNY. Spencer was a doctoral fellow with the Grad Center’s Mellon Committee for Globalization and Social Change is a recipient of the Graduate Center’s 2016-2017 dissertation award in American Studies.
Collected Work
How to Break an Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism
How To Break An Addiction paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction. In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth. How To Break An Addiction renders visible the extent to which the world we inhabit today is made by addiction—in capital’s image—and against life and well-being. Spencer calls for redress of the deepening crisis of addiction and the so-called ‘epidemic’ of pain at its root; for a paradigm shift away from the dominant economic logic in favor of new kinds of ecosystemic social practice and provision. We must innovate a new way of being human together in the here and now. Spencer’s first-person narration anchors rigorous and far-reaching research and theory, making for an original and impactful tour through capital’s addiction to crisis and our ability—and need—to break from it.