This is an ethnographic study of how curanderas (healers), physicians, scientists, people who use drugs and health advocates participate in emergent forms of addiction science, recovery medicine, and care. Across archives, participant observation, and interviews, data was derived from field notes and conversations in and about institutions of drug science and recovery medicine, contested socio-technical landscapes, and sites of drug advocacy. Focusing on the data from these sites and relevant emergent artifacts from that data, this dissertation recounts case studies focusing on three well-meaning public health interventions for substance use disorders (SUDs) and related harms in New Mexico over the last 50 years including: (1) treatment provisioning of the biomedical technologies methadone, buprenorphine and naloxone for opioid use disorder and related overdose prevention in the context of the harm reduction movement; (2) neuroscience solutionism for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and reproductive justice; and (3) safe-use drug supply, emancipatory technoscience, and economic development in the context of 1960s-1970s Chicano movement. Recovery Futures offers a situated, yet partial contemporary history of drug recovery science and addiction medicine, one grounded in social movements, culture, power, state-building, and biomedicine. I suggest that biotechnologies of SUDs intervention emerged as a core, but troubled, site of innovation and that there are social and political incongruencies of modernizing drug recovery science and medicine as a both a state-building project and citizen science project that present challenges to doing medicine and science in postcolonial contexts.

In this dissertation, I explore the possibility of Latin American Futurism/s because Latin American visions of the future are primarily absent from the global conversation of alternative or counter futures. In three chapters, I expose three interrelated yet methodologically different approaches to understanding the emerging phenomenon of Latin American Futurism/s: A exploration of the connections between notions of visions of technology/futures for El Salvador's Bitcoin and South Cone's robots, the experiences and practices of local future-makers and their communities; and artifacts that characterize expressions of regional futuring. To comprehend the region's technological paradigms, I offer these socio-technical accounts of Future-making and Future-knowledge for/from Latin America as a geo-political region. Each element contributes, with its different interdisciplinary perspective, to characterizing "Latin American Futurism/s" as a form of technological rationality and regional futuring as an expression of shared paradigms about science and technology. These characterizations allow for an appreciation of the paradigms, strategies, and artifacts that configure domestic and professional futurity in Latin America, focusing on its objects and visions as mediators and sense-makers of what ought to come. In this manuscript, I offer a characterization of Latin American futurism/s to facilitate its recognition and understanding and to put in value the production of forward-oriented knowledge produced by people thinking and living in Latin America.