About Dr. Clarke

Adele E. Clarke is Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Trained by Anselm Strauss, she has been using and teaching grounded theory since 1980. She has been pushing and pulling grounded theory around the postmodern turn by emphasizing cartographic and positional approaches, focusing on the situation as the unit of analysis, and turning to the analysis of discourses.

Clarke’s research has focused on social, cultural, and historical studies of science, technology, and medicine.  She is particularly interested in biomedicalization and common medical technologies pertinent to women's health such as contraception and the Pap smear.

In addition to Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn (Sage, 2005), she is the author of Disciplining Reproduction: American Life Scientists and the ‘Problem of Sex’ (University of California Press, 1998). She also co-edited with Joan Fujimura The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth Century Life Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1992), with Sheryl Ruzek and Virginia Olesen Women's Health: Complexities and Diversities (Ohio State University Press, 1997), and with Virginia Olesen Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Cultural, Feminist and Technoscience Perspectives (Routledge, 1999).  Her paper titled "Modernity, Postmodernity and Human Reproductive Processes, c1890-present, or 'Mommy, where do cyborgs come from anyway?'" is in The Cyborg Handbook (Routledge, 1995).  Finally, Clarke’s recent collaborative work on biomedicalization in the U.S. appeared as: Clarke, Adele E., Jennifer Fishman, Jennifer Fosket, Laura Mamo and Janet Shim. 2003. “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine.” American Sociological Review 68(April):161-194.

Her current project takes up the history of biomedicalization and globalization by focusing on how medicines have traveled since the early twentieth century.

Website / CV

Sep 25, 2012