Biopower, Disciplinary Power and Surveillance: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Lived Experience of People Who Use Drugs in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on the role of police as primary actors in the arena of citizen safety, this article examines the impact of policing practices on the daily lived experience of people who use drugs in accessing a supervised consumption site in Vancouver, Canada. The site is located in the heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighborhood at a community center that I refer to as the Hawthorne Resource Centre. The method of data collection for this study comprised five months of ethnographic fieldwork, including focus groups and one-on-one interviews with community members accessing the site, site staff and management. Drawing on Foucauldian conceptualizations of power, the findings of this research suggest that governmental modes of power, including biopower and disciplinary power, are pervasively operative in various realms of the day to day lives of the Hawthorne Resource Centre clients. Evidence of the scalable nature of these modes of power are seen within the internal functioning of the Supervised Consumption Site, outside in the methods of community policing in the DTES and in weekly police practices in Oppenheimer Park. As such, this study represents a multiscalar assessment of how these Foucauldian power structures work at multiple levels and locations in the DTES. Driven by the narratives of the Hawthorne Resource Centre clients, the findings of this research illustrate not only the importance of understanding power relations within specific policy interventions, but further, highlight how specific tactics mobilized within “harm reduction policing” would be relevant and applicable to the context of the DTES.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".