Emma Whelan

BA Hons (Winnipeg), MA (Queen's), PhD (Carleton)

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FASS Building, Room 1115

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Emma Whelan is a sociologist whose research is concerned with problems of knowledge, representation, science, and health. She is interested in three main questions: How do we know (or think we know) about health and illness? How do we make claims about healthiness, illness, and health care? And how do competing stakeholders in the health arena struggle for power and credibility? Dr. Whelan has worked on a variety of health-related studies covering such diverse topics as aging with a disability, nineteenth century municipal sanitation initiatives, breast implants, and gynecological and patient perspectives on understanding endometriosis. She has a particular interest in the gendered aspects of health. For the past nine years, she has been studying the social epistemology of pain, particularly the efforts of medical communities to classify and measure pain and patients' strategies for making persuasive claims about pain. She is now writing up the results of a four-year study, funded by the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, of media and state representations of OxyContin, a prescription opioid used to treat pain, as a highly addictive ‘problem drug,’ and the responses of pain medicine and pain activist communities to such representations. Her latest project, continuing a longstanding interest in standardization practices and the expert-lay divide, concerns the role of public participation, via the Internet, in the development of the 11^th edition of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases.

Dr. Whelan is cross-appointed to Gender and Women's Studies. She works with graduate students in the following areas: critical analyses of health, illness, public health, and medicine; social studies of knowledge, academia and the disciplines; expert-lay relations; science and technology studies; qualitative methods; risk, surveillance and moral regulation; contemporary social theory; gender; sexuality.

Selected Publications:

2009. “Negotiating science and experience in medical knowledge: Gynaecologists on endometriosis.” Social Science & Medicine 68(8), 1489-1497.

2009. “How Classification Works, Or Doesn’t: The Case of Chronic Pain.” In David Byrne and Charles C. Ragin (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Case Based Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

2007. “’No one agrees except for those of us who have it’: Endometriosis Patients as an Epistemological Community.” Sociology of Health & Illness 29(7), 957-982.

2003. “Putting Pain to Paper: Endometriosis and the Documentation of Suffering” Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 7(4), 463-482.

2001. “Politics by Other Means: Feminism and Mainstream Science Studies.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 26(4):535-581.

1999. “Menstrual Disorder Technologies.” In Annette Burfoot (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Reproductive Technologies (pp. 109-113). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.