GVTXs


The dissertation How to Break an Addiction is embargoed, but I share it with people active in the struggle on the opioid epidemic. Write me to request it. Below is the acknowledgements section from the dissertation.  I'm in awe at what we do for each other. 


I was inspired to this work by all the beautiful people, who reminded me of my siblings and childhood playmates, whose lives were prematurely and preventable lost in the course of this crisis. I received an enormous amount of loving support on the road to completion of this work. To recall it all in an attempt to capture and name it here is nearly overwhelming and reminds me that this is the most beautiful and essential part of what it is to be a human being. It appears on no balance sheet. It is simply and profoundly what we do for each other.

I had the honor of being a fellow at the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change throughout my coursework at the Graduate Center. In addition to the crucial financial support, the exposure to intellectual, revolutionary, inspirited ideas shared by the committed and formidable group of scholars there was a boon to my own intellectual development. I am particularly grateful for the connection with David Harvey, Kandice Chuh, Anthony Alessandrini, Herman Bennett, Susan Buck-Morss, Uday Mehta, Jeremy Rayner, and others.

Vinay Gidwani encouraged my application to the Graduate Center. The Institute for Human Geography provided a grant towards my research. Mazen Labban, Richard Peet and other members of the collective were supportive of my vision for the work. My experience organizing with the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and StrikeDebt campaigns were formative and catalyzing experiences. I am grateful for the camaraderie and kindred visioning and writing sessions with Andrew Ross, Randy Martin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bertell Ollman, Pamela Brown, Christopher Brown, Ann Larson, David Graeber and others.

Francesca Manning has been a comrade and family. She challenged me to be more rigorous in everything and stoked my passions for intellectual and revolutionary commitments. A Marxist reading group sans cis-men, organized by Francesca and others in Brooklyn in 2011, is where I learned to recognize the resonance of my intellectual contributions. I am particularly thankful to Morgan Buck, Farah Khimji, and Emilie Connolly.

The community of scholarship, friendship, organizing and future dreaming at the Graduate Center was nurturing and sustaining. David Spataro, Christian Anderson, Amanda Huron, Rachel Goffe, Keith Miyake, Owen Toews, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, Sam Stein, Deshonay Dozier and others, in particular, members of the Space-Time Research Collective, provided inspiration, collaboration and care.

Christina Cook, Katie Keating, Zoe Odlin-Platz, Lizzie Garnatz, Shawn Peterson, Christopher Buerkle, Caroline Teschke and the staff at the India Street Public Health Clinic provided community of purpose that supported me greatly. David Zysk (rest in power), Andrew Kiezulas, Dean Lemire, and Christopher Poulos inspired me immensely. Rob Korobkin gave me crucial financial support and encouragement. Emma Heaney and Nick Underwood provided tactical, grounding inspiration. Samaa Abdurraqib and Sue Houchins provided scholarly companionship and writerly inspiration. Samaa gave helpful feedback on a very early draft of my theoretical framing. Sage Hayes facilitated my process in many ways and helped me find my footing and my voice at a critical conjuncture in my life. Ray Luc Levasseaur continues to be my friend, mentor and kin. Ray helped me find the feeling of home here on Earth, as myself and in myself, and helped me come to know what was mine to do with my righteous rage and grief.

My committee members David Harvey and Kandice Chuh have inspired and nurtured my work throughout my time at the Graduate Center. Getting to sit at the seminar table with them weekly in the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change was a profound encounter in my first year at the Graduate Center. I am grateful for the occasions spent talking through my ideas in their offices, for the brilliance they share, and for their fruitful and considerable feedback on this work. It was reading David’s Spaces of Global Capital on my first summer in Dhaka in 2007 that inspired me to pursue a PhD in Geography.

My year as a fellow with the Center for Place Culture and Politics in AY 2016-2017 was electrifying and catalyzing. I am grateful for the work, ideas, feedback and engagement of the whole cohort and especially that of Maria Luisa Mendonça, Sónia Vaz Borges, Ujju Aggarwal, Brian Jones, Mamyrah Prosper, Christian Steiner, Leigh Claire LaBerge, Peter Hitchcock, Kafui Attoh, Lori Ungemah, Mary Taylor and Alf Nilsen. Neil Agarwal has been a kindred spirit, comrade in idea(l)s, and intellectual interlocutor throughout my time at the Graduate Center. I am immensely grateful for his friendship.

Farida Akhter and Farhad Mazher welcomed me into their home in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2011 where we drank strong, sweet tea and discussed Marx, Lalon, Jesus, the etheric realm, consciousness, and revolution. The seeds planted in our encounter continue to bear much fruit in my scholarship, political sight and revolutionary imaginary. My time with the Naya Krishi Andolan farmers and UBINIG staff in Tangail and Dhaka shaped my ideas about collective learning, post-capitalist transition and growing the future together. Anupam Das and family connected me to the lived history of liberation struggle in Bangladesh and beyond. I will always remember their teachings, generosity, grace and love. Ahmed Shamim encouraged my hunch that rather than studying faraway people and places, I might use my dissertation to ask the same set of questions about circumstances very close to home. Two fellowships from the US Department of State Critical Language Scholars program allowed for these connections.

Steve McFarland and Isa Knafo provided considerable and generous editing and moral support. Their commitment to helping me and the completion of this work has been a beautiful and healing gift and has forged a lasting connection between us. I am humbled and in awe of their love in action. They inspire me to both repay and pay forward the gift. Kareem Rabie read a nearly completed draft of chapters 1 and 2 and gave formative and helpful feedback that will improve future versions of the work.

My uncle Joseph Spencer and Reverend Brynde Lambert were and continue to be my spiritual parents, nurturing me in wisdom and light and encouraging me on my path to completing my PhD and beyond. Dory Cote and the community I met through the Center for Earth Light Healing have also been spiritual family for me. I am especially grateful for the fortifying friendship of Mimi Hamilton. Martin Andersson, Hilde Andersen and Siv Hansson provided a welcoming home base in Sweden and space and support for writing and healing.

Thank you to Monica Varsanyi, Judy Li, Yehuda Klein and Lina McClain at the Graduate Center. Thanks to my students at the University of Southern Maine, Bates College, and Hunter College, CUNY.

Martin Sunnerdahl, more than anyone, is to thank for this work becoming real in the world. We created a home together, and in doing so, I came home more fully to myself. Through playfulness and steadiness, Martin taught me unconditional love, the basis of all good co-creation. He also provided considerable editing and formatting support and heaps of emotional and mental fortification.

My first year at the graduate center I had the profound honor of working with Neil Smith in what would be the last, lucid, beautiful, incendiary, mostly sober, year of his life. Neil’s vibration still catches me on the wind all the time. He’s in the knots, twists and bends of my thinking daily. There’s always another layer, dimension, or dialectical spiral to it all that he taught me to consider and recognize, if not see clearly. Neil made for me a delight of the daunting task of learning theory and to theorize. He inticed me so wittingly to join the thirsty horde of us engaged in the project To See the Earth Before the End of the World, as Ed Robertson put it. For the longest time I thought I failed Neil, and I thought Neil failed me too. But I now know a deeper truth and can see more clearly a constellation gesturing at the wholeness of it all, just perfect as it was, as it is. Neil taught me to give fully of myself to inquiry in pursuit of how we all get free, and to feel correct in giving none of myself to inquiry in pursuit of anything less.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore shaped the contours of my consciousness and my pedagogy more than anyone living. My encounter with her was fated, to be sure, and I never left her presence having not learned something extremely valuable, in personal and collective terms. Her seminars were electrifying; her public talks still leave me in a quake. Ruthie taught me how to play the game of life. She taught me that the purpose of living is to change said game, to make more space, ever still, for evermore liberation. She taught me that in order to achieve abolition, the necessary terrain for the liberation for all, just one thing must change—everything. Much remains uncertain in the present, but one thing I’m sure of— in my life, Ruthie changed everything.

This work is dedicated to my family—my parents Charles and Mary Xibos Spencer and my brothers Joseph, Augustus, Michael and James. This work is dedicated to my ancestors and to all people who feel the world deeply and who have used substances to access the revolutionary potential in the temporary transit to the spacetime of feelin’ good. May we all know our deep goodness. May we all get free.