Dr. Joanna Latimer is Emerita Professor at University of York’s Department of Sociology. Joanna grew up in London and studied English Literature at Queen Mary College. She went on to train as a nurse at University College Hospital, working in and writing about nursing for ten years. As a ward sister, she won a fellowship to undertake her PhD on older people, care, and acute medicine at Edinburgh University. She went on to become an internationally celebrated sociologist of biomedicine, health care, and post-human theory. Joanna retired from her role as Professor of Sociology, Science & Technology and Director of SATSU, York’s world-renowned Science & Technology Studies Unit during the pandemic. Her current work focusses on ageing and end of life care and she has recently been invited to join Dementia Life worlds, an interdisciplinary research group at University College Cork, Ireland, as Visiting Professor.
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 across the arts, humanities, and sciences. 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 marginalised. Her underlying aim is to critique the conditions of possibility that underpin hierarchical relations, including promoting creative and aesthetic methodologies.
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. 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. Joanna is passionate about enabling participation and engagement in the field of arts, creativity and wellbeing, and extending the reach of the arts to the most excluded communities and individuals in London and beyond.
