Jessica Polzer

Polzer headshotAssociate Professor
MSc, PhD
Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies & Health Sciences
Office: Lawson Hall 
Phone: 519-661-2111 ext. 81576
jpolzer@uwo.ca

 

Research

My interdisciplinary program of research focuses broadly on the biopolitics of health in the 21st century and my research projects to date have examined gendered experiences of health and embodiment in relation to discourses on risk and/or biotechnology. More recently, my work on vaccine hesitancy and my supervision of doctoral research projects related to narratives of caregiving have made important contributions to the field of critical health humanities. My current research is located in critical menstrual studies and focuses on the biopedagogical aspects of menstrual tracking experiences among gender-diverse app users.  I have an ongoing fascination with the ways that statistics and statistical language are engaged in official and everyday health discourse and pandemic narratives. I have extensive experience designing, conducting, and supervising feminist and otherwise critical qualitative health research. My dissertation on women's shifting understandings of their genetic risks for breast cancer during the process of BRCA1/2 mutation testing was one of the first to use Michel Foucault's theories of biopower, governmentality, and technologies of the self as a lens to examine the embodiment and lived experience of technological risk within neoliberal health contexts and was awarded the Illinois Distinguished Qualitative Dissertation Award by the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. 

Podcasts

Facca, D., Molinaro, M., & Polzer, J. (2024). Narrative Remedies: Re-Scripting Care. Co-creator and Executive Producer. A podcast series that explores the role of storytelling as a way to unravel the complexities of the personal, social, political, historical, and moral dimensions of health, medicine, and health care.: https://narrativeremedies.podbean.com/

Selected Publications

  1. Molinaro, M.L., Polzer, J., Laliberte Rudman, D., & Savundranayagam, M. (2024). Pediatric oncology caregiving as narrative repair: Restor(y)ing disrupted family biographies and damaged moral identities. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. doi: 10.1177/13634593241270955
  2. Molinaro, M., Polzer, J., Laliberte Rudman, D. and Savundranayagan, M. (2023). “I can’t be the nurse I want to be”: Counter-stories of moral distress in pediatric oncology nurses’ caregiving narratives. Social Science and Medicine, 320, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953623000321 
  3. Bourne, S., Kothari, A., Wathen, N., & Polzer, J. (2022). Canadian Environmental Health Officer Perceptions of Barriers to Research Utilization in Everyday and Emergency Practice. Environmental Health Review, 65(2), 45-55. https://pubs.ciphi.ca/doi/pdf/10.5864/d2022-009  
  4. Baada, J. and Polzer, J. (2022). Ambivalent Complicities and Knowledge Production: Researching Migrant Women Farmers’ Reproductive Health Experiences in the Middle Belt of Ghana. Sociology of Health and Illness (Special Issue on Complicity: Methodologies of power, politics, and the ethics of knowledge production). http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13407  
  5. Polzer, J., Sui, A., Ge, K. and Cayen, L. (2022). Empowerment through participatory surveillance? Menstrual and fertility self-tracking apps as postfeminist biopedagogies. In Fellows, J. and Smith, L. (Eds.). Gender, Sex, and Tech!  An Intersectional Feminist Guide. Toronto: Canadian Scholars and Women’s Press.   
  6. Polzer, J. and Wakewich, P. (2021). Mothers who know best: Narratives of motherhood and epistemological anxieties in vaccine hesitancy discourse. In Neil Brooks and Sarah Blanchette (Eds.), Narrative Art and the Politics of Health. London, UK: Anthem Press. pp. 95-117. 
  7. Polzer, J., Cayen, L., and Molinaro, M. (2020). The shifting politics of health in Canada: Papanicolaou (Pap) screening, human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, and cervical cancer prevention. In Tremblay, M. and Everitt, J. (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Sexuality and Canadian Politics. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 485-506. 
  8. Haw, J., Polzer, J., Devine, D.  (2020). Emotional labour and cord blood donation: Perspectives of frontline staff. Journal of Health Organization and Management. DOI (10.1108/JHOM-10-2019-0305).  
    https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JHOM-10-2019-0305/full/html 
  9.  Katzman, E., Kinsella, A., and Polzer, J. (2020). ‘Everything is down to the minute’: clock time, crip time and the relational work of self-managing attendant service. Disability and Society, 35(4): 517-541.  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2019.1649126?journalCode=cdso20
  10.  Haw, J., Polzer, J., Devine, D. (2019). Contextual factors influencing donor recruitment and cord blood collection: Perspectives of frontline staff of the Canadian Blood Services’ Cord Blood Bank. Transfusion, 59(5), 1742-1748. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/trf.15185
  11.  Rail, G., Molina, L., Fusco, C., Norman, M., Petherick, L., Polzer, J., Moola, F., and Bryson, M. (2018). HPV Vaccination Discourses and the Construction of "At-Risk" Girls". Canadian Journal of Public Health, 109(5-6), 622-632.  https://link.springer.com/article/10.17269/s41997-018-0108-8
  12. Polzer, J. and Power, E. (2016). Neoliberal Governance and Health: Duties, Risks and Vulnerabilities. Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. 
  13.  Sanford, S., Polzer, J., & McDonough, P. (2016). Preparedness as a technology of (in)security: Pandemic influenza planning and the global biopolitics of emerging infectious disease. Social Theory & Health, 14(1), 18-43.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7100152/pdf/41285_2016_Article_BFsth20158.pdf
  14.  Polzer, J., Mancuso, F. & Laliberte Rudman, D. (2014). Risk, responsibility, resistance: Young women’s negotiations of identity and healthy citizenship in human papillomavirus (HPV) narratives. Narrative Inquiry, 24(2), 281-308.  https://benjamins.com/catalog/ni.24.2.06pol
  15.   McDonough, P. & Polzer, J.  (2012). Habitus, hysteresis and organizational change in the public sector, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 37(4), 357-380.   https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/cjs/index.php/CJS/article/view/11266
  16.  Polzer, J. & Knabe, S. (2012). From desire to disease: Human papillomavirus (HPV) and the medicalization of nascent female sexuality. Special issue of the Journal of Sex Research on the Medicalization of Sex, 49(4), 344-352.   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22720826/
  17.  Mancuso, F. & Polzer, J. (2010). “It’s your body but…”: Young women’s narratives of declining human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, Canadian Woman Studies, 28 (2-3, Spring/Summer), 77-81. Special issue on Women and Cancer.  https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/view/31493
  18. Polzer, J. & Robertson, A.  (2010). Seeing and knowing in 21st century genomic medicine: The clinical pedigree as epistemological tool and hybrid risk technique, New Genetics & Society, 29(2), 133-147.  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14636778.2010.484227
  19.  MacEachen, E., Polzer, J., & Clarke, J. (2008). "You are free to set your own hours": Governing worker productivity and health through flexibility and resilience, Social Science & Medicine, 66, 1019-1033.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953607005862
  20. Polzer, J., Mercer, S., Goel, V. (2002). ‘Blood is thicker than water’: Genetic testing as citizenship through familial obligation and the management of risk, Critical Public Health, 12(2), 1-16. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09581590210127389