Dr. Elizabeth F.S. Roberts
Professor of Anthropology
Elizabeth F.S. Roberts is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who investigates scientific and public health knowledge production and its embodied effects in Latin America and the United States. She is currently involved in a number of interdisciplinary collaborative projects with engineers, environmental health and life scientists in the United States and Mexico as part of “Mexican Exposures: A Bioethnographic Approach to Health and Inequality” (MEXPOS), a cluster of ongoing team-based projects in Mexico City that she directs.
In these projects, she and her team trace the looping social, economic, biological, and technical processes that shape everyday life, health, and inequality in working class neighborhoods. One of the key aims of Professor Roberts’ current work is the development of bioethnography, a method that combines social and life sciences approaches in order to make better knowledge about health and inequality.
Dr. Roberts’ earlier research focused on assisted reproduction in the United States and Ecuador, reproductive governance in Latin America, and transnational medical migrations. She is the author of the book God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes (U.C. California Press 2012) and most recently, In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World (Princeton University Press, 2025).
Email : [email protected]
New Book: In Praise of Addiction
Read the review in Times Literary Supplement!
Read the review in Publishers Weekly!
Buy a copy here!
Read short essay,”Embracing Addiction” here!
Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.
In Praise of Addiction shares the unexpected journey that led Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.
Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.
Media
“What If We Stopped Feeling Ashamed of Ourselves? Elizabeth Roberts on Her Book ‘In Praise of Addiction'” (Recovery Demystified, July 14, 2026)
“The Hidden Praise of Addiction (featuring Elizabeth F.S. Roberts)” (Talking Addiction & Recovery, July 13, 2026)
“The Schism of Addiction and Vice with Elizabeth Roberts” (Narcotica, Episode 96, July 7, 2026)
“We Should Praise Addiction, Not Condemn It, Says Anthropologist Elizabeth Roberts”(Depresh Mode with John Moe, Episode 266, June 29 2026)
Altars of Addiction: A Q&A With Elizabeth Roberts (Interview with Clio’s Books, June 26 2026)
Rats in a trap: The human ecology that promotes addiction (Jessie Munton, Times Literary Supplement, June 25 2026)
Is Addiction Always a Bad Thing? (Interview with P.E. Moskowitz, Mental Health XYZ, June 3 2026)
In Praise of Addiction: Elizabeth Roberts on vice, dependency, and devotion (Clio’s Books, May 12 2026)
“In Praise of Pleasure” (Filter, April 17 2026)
Embracing Addiction (Princeton University Press, February 20 2026)
