



































 1 

 

 Being Everywhere and Dreaming about Possible Places: An Interview on Danya Fast’s 

The Best Place  

 

Introduction: In the Wake of The Best Place 

 

In the summer of 2024, I returned to Toronto to trace the daily movements of Somali Canadians 

experiencing homelessness and a history of substance use. As I became interested in developing 

methods that attended to spatial histories and invitations to life stories offered through Somali 

Canadian movements, I encountered Dr. Danya Fast’s The Best Place. 

 

 The Best Place is an ethnography that explores how youth in Vancouver dream of a place amid 

systemic exclusion, overdose risks, and housing precarity. Fast offers a compelling example of the 

possibilities that emerge when ethnography and public health interventions take communities’ 

dreams and imaginations of place seriously. In the fall of 2024, I was fortunate to interview Fast 

to explore themes of place, field sites, writing, dreams, and the anthropology of the future. What 

follows is a glimpse into our conversation.  

 

The Interview 

 

Hannah: I’d like to begin with how you organized The Best Place. I appreciate how your 

ethnography begins in a particular setting (e.g., a shelter) and moves towards this concept of 

‘everywhereness,’ highlighting the multiple ways youth experience place in Vancouver. What did 

you want readers to take away from the structure of the book?  

 



 2 

Danya Fast: The chapters in the book reflect where I began, in downtown Vancouver, and how I 

was drawn into the evolving possibilities of places for young people. From the outset, I was 

compelled to write in moments when young people refused assumptions about belonging to “street 

youth community” tied to a specific inner-city neighborhood. It took me some time to realize how 

their mobility could be read as a refusal of confinement—within poverty management and public 

health infrastructures, as well as assumptions about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside 

neighborhood as the “proper” place for those experiencing addiction. 

 

Instead, my young interlocutors had big dreams and their geographic mobility through the city 

continually ruptured bounded notions of who they were, where they belonged, and what they were 

reaching for. I hope the book’s structure shows that I was catching on to what young people were 

telling me from the outset: “I'm everywhere. I'm not in one place.” I also made the decision to end 

with this sense of ‘everywhereness’ to underscore how those who have died from overdose have 

their names etched in graffiti across city buildings and remain present in the lives of those who 

live on. 

 

Hannah: As you cataloged the rhythms of these youths' lives during fieldwork that spans more 

than a decade, how did the meaning of the book change? 

 

Danya Fast: My writing is increasingly inspired by my work with young drug users and family 

member activists in Vancouver who are fighting for change. Currently, six people a day are dying 

of overdoses in the province of British Columbia, where Vancouver is located. We've lost over 

150 young people under the age of 19 to overdose. If we expand the age range to include youth up 

to 29, the number rises into the thousands.  

 

We're involved in this life-or-death fight for the kinds of support and care that young people need 

to keep themselves and those they love alive. By the time I completed writing this book, I was 

much more involved in political advocacy alongside youth drug user activists than I had been when 

I began researching and writing The Best Place. I was more critically considering the place of my 

book within the political landscape and loss of life I was witnessing.  



 3 

Hannah: Another political move I see your book making is it articulates young people’s big city 

dreams beyond the language of resistance and submission. I wonder how do you theorize an 

alternative to being that isn't defined by the grammar of resistance?  

Danya Fast: I wanted to foreground these youths’ dreams and desires in the city, which engaged 

with yet also existed outside of grammars of control and resistance. At the same time, I am aware 

that people may read my work and argue that these youth’s dreams are a form of resistance.  

 

What I really wanted to explore was that, even as life became more dire, and it became clear that 

youth might not realize their dreams of place in the city, dreaming was still a way of generating an 

affective sense of forward momentum. For example, I remember those final, heartbreaking 

moments with Terry – the last time I saw him before his death – when he was so unwell and yet 

still dreaming about having a girlfriend who understood him.  

 

Part of my theoretical and methodological aim for this book was to stay close to how young 

people's articulations of their big city dreams constitute a meaningful way of being in this world—

one oriented toward moving forward, and that is far more complex than resisting regimes of 

oppression. 

 

Hannah: The way you describe dreams prompts me to consider the possibilities these youth 

envision, which leads me to my final question: How does The Best Place contributes to discussions 

on the anthropology of the future? Questions of future in your ethnography dawned on me as I 

read your emotional last chapter which featured Patty’s photography of the beach that showed 

“everything that she loved about the city” (p.179). I could not help but notice how the water in 

Patty’s image was flowing—with what I assumed to be different tempos of currents—toward a 

horizon, perhaps beyond the mountains pictured. As a reader I found this image epitomized youths’ 

forward movements which also unfold through the uncertainty, the highs and the lows of ordinary 

life, friendship, and substance use. I'd like to know how your focus on this idea of forward 

movement opens up your thinking about the temporalities of the future.  

 

Danya Fast: I think about what these young people’s desires to move forward can teach us about 

how to live in troubled and uncertain times, where many of us may feel like we're sinking into 



 4 

stagnation. My book explores how the interventions intended to ameliorate trouble and uncertainty 

can also create forms of stagnation that actually prevent communities from moving towards 

imagined futures. However, perhaps it also gestures to how communal care can generate a sense 

of momentum and futurity. We don’t think about this enough in policy and practice. We’re so 

focused on saving lives. And I, as much as anyone, don’t want to see more young people die. But 

what my interlocutors have told me is that staying alive is not enough. They frequently described 

a desire for a sense of forward momentum — and if they couldn’t find it in school or work or 

homemaking or services, they would look for it in substances, crime, and volatile romantic 

relationships. I think these young people offer crucial insights into the kinds of cities we want to 

create—namely, places where everyone can have a sense of being part of something rife with 

potential and forward momentum.  

 

An Unending: The Now and Unfixed Futures 

 

As dusk settled in for me, and our conversation dwindled into a lingering closure, Dr. Fast and I 

sat with the ways drug ethnographies contextualize the future. We thought about the futures that 

become plausible through the ways communities stay in a moment, relinquish concerns of a future 

anticipated, and reach into what stretches beyond current affairs.  

 

References 

Fast, D. (2023). The best place: Addiction, intervention, and living and dying young in Vancouver. 

Rutgers University Press. 

 

 

Danya Fast: Dr. Danya Fast is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of 

Social Medicine) at UBC and a Faculty Associate of the Department of Anthropology. She is also 

an Investigator at British Columbia Children’s Hospital Research Institute and Foundry. Her 

research focuses on the relationship between health and place among young people who use drugs 

in the margins of the city. 

 



 5 

Hannah Ali: Hannah Ali is a PhD candidate in Medical and Cultural Anthropology at Cornell 

University. Her doctoral project explores the various ways Somali Canadians draw on religious 

and cultural repertoires while enduring Toronto’s drug toxicity crisis. More broadly, Hannah’s 

research interests include art-based methods (such as play), care, psychoanalysis health, and 

religious constructions of healing within the Somali diaspora. 

 

 

 

© Hannah Ali 

 


