Dr. Joanna Latimer is Emerita Professor at University of York’s Department of Sociology. She retired from her University roles in December 2020, the most recent of which was Professor of Sociology, Science & Technology at the University of York. During her tenure there she became Director of SATSU, York’s world-renowned Science & Technology Studies Unit.
Joanna loves teaching and supervising students and health professionals across every level. Her research is always collaborative, working with different practitioners and connecting diverse disciplines. Her approach is ethnographic, focussing on the cultural, social and experiential dimensions of how healthcare, medicine and science are practised. She particularly cares about making ordinary processes of inclusion and exclusion visible, including attending to the experiences of those who are easily marginalized. Her underlying aim is to critique the conditions of possibility that underpin hierarchical relations, including promoting creative and aesthetic as well as scientific methodologies for health and care.
Publishing many articles, special issues and books, including The Conduct of Care, Unknowing Bodies and The Gene, The Clinic & The Family, winner of the 2014 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness annual book prize, she unpacks the worlds people make together and the politics they are entangled in across different institutions (e.g. the clinic, the family and the laboratory). Recent research investigates ageing, including a special issue of New Genetics and Society on contemporary developments in dementia science. Currently she is developing interspecies approaches to exploring the affective and ecological dimensions of biomedicine and care at the beginnings and ends of life, including the monograph, Intimate Entanglements.
Joanna has been on the advisory boards of research programs and esteemed institutions worldwide, holding visiting chairs at Sidney University, University of California San Francisco, the Humanistic University, Utrecht, and Fiocruz, Brazil. Additionally, she was a longstanding member of the editorial board of The Sociological Review, and co-editor of Sociology of Health and Illness. She originally studied English Literature as an undergraduate, and then trained, worked and wrote as a nurse for ten years.
