Sean Muller

In rural America, fentanyl overdose and neglected property have become valuable resources mobilized in appeals for reparative funding. By conducting ethnographic and archival research in Sullivan County, NY—a region that is both the state’s “overdose capital” and a site of rapid rural gentrification—this project examines how certain places and problems are deemed deserving of social investment. It also traces how and why those investments often fail to alter the conditions they are intended to improve. Through collaborating with politicians, public servants, and community organizers engaged in the work of raising funds and implementing policy, this research questions why the county’s degraded social and economic conditions, of which addiction and poverty are symptoms, continue to intensify despite well-meaning investments to rectify them.