Joanna Kempner is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University
where she writes, researches and speaks about medicine, science, politics, gender and the body.

She is the author of  Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health, an award winning book that examines the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. In addition to studying how social relations shape the production of knowledge, she is also on the vanguard of research investigating  how the social world shapes what we do not know or what scholars are now calling “agnotology,” aka the study of ignorance or the “flip side” of epistemology. She is currently writing a book about citizen scientists who use psychedelic medicine to treat pain. Recently, these citizen science projects have gained the attention of policymakers and academics, paving the way for a growing number of FDA-approved clinical trials on psychedelics, cannabis, and MDMA.

Kempner received her PhD from Penn’s Department of Sociology, worked as a Research Associate at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University, and served as postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of Michigan from 2004-2006. She is a recipient of Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, one of Rutgers’ highest honors.

Follow Kempner on twitter: www.twitter.com/joannakempner

You can also read her posts on migraine.com

 

 

 

​