Dr Kate Weiner
Faculty Research Fellow (BSc, MA, PhD)
Room: Elmfield, B07 | Telephone: 0114 222 6491 (external), 26491 (internal)
Academic Profile
I joined the department as a faculty research fellow in September 2012. Before this, I completed my PhD and two personal fellowships at the University of Nottingham and then worked as an advisor on the NIHR-funded Research Design Service at the University of Manchester.
I work at the intersection of medical sociology and science and technology studies. My research interests include lay and professional knowledge, user-technology relations, and health identities and responsibilities. I have undertaken research in the areas of genetics, heart disease and patient’s organisations. I am increasingly interested in consumer health technologies.
Research
My doctoral research, completed in 2006, looked at lay and professional constructions of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), a treatable hereditary condition associated with heart disease. My analysis focussed on the themes of geneticisation, genetic responsibility and biosociality, three prominent concepts in discussions of the social implications of genetic knowledge.
Recently completed research projects have looked at more mundane health technologies for cholesterol management, engaging with ideas about ‘health behaviours’ and the distributions of responsibilities in preventing illness. A two-year project funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship focused on cholesterol-lowering foods containing plant sterols. A parallel project undertaken in collaboration with Catherine Will at the University of Sussex, and funded by an ESRC small grant, looked at prescription and over-the-counter statins. These projects engaged with professional expectations as well as people’s accounts of their uses and non-uses of the products.
My current research is expanding this work on consumer health technologies, looking at self-monitoring technologies , asking why and how these technologies are being adopted by individuals/households and with what implications for responsibilities, subjectivities and forms of expertise in relation to health care.
| Funded Research Projects | ||
|---|---|---|
| Date | Sponsor | Details |
| 2012-15 | University of Sheffield, Faculty of Social Sciences | Self-monitoring and consumer health technologies in the domestic, commercial and virtual realms |
| 2010-11 | Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness | Pharmaceutical dissent in comparative perspective |
| 2009-11 | ESRC | DIY heart health: accounting for the ‘use’ of over-the-counter statins |
| 2008-10 | Leverhulme Trust | Phytosterols: public expectations and user practices’ |
| 2006-08 | ESRC/MRC | Lipids, genetics and coronary heart disease: the construction of a field |
Teaching
I currently convene the following postgraduate module:
- SCS6390 Science, Technology and Society
See our Postgraduate taught degree pages.
Publications
Will, C., and Weiner, K. (forthcoming) Do-it-yourself heart health? ‘Lay’ practices and products for disease prevention, Health Sociology Review
Prainsack, B. and Weiner, K. (forthcoming) Genetic Indeterminism of Social Action in B. Kaldis (Ed) Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage, Thousands Oaks, California.
Weiner, K (forthcoming) Genetic expectations in the field of heart disease: questioning the geneticisation thesis, in Martin Doering & Regine Kollek (eds) “Emerging Diseases”: Structure, controversy and change in the scientific making of disease patterns, Transcript, Bielefeld.
Weiner, K. (2011) The subject of functional foods: accounts of consuming foods containing phytosterols, Sociological Research Online, 16, 2, 7. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/2/7.html
Weiner, K. (2011) Exploring genetic responsibility for self, family and kin in the case of hereditary raised cholesterol, Social Science and Medicine, 72, 11, 1760-1767.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.053
Weiner, K. (2010) Configuring users of cholesterol lowering foods: a review of biomedical discourse, Social Science and Medicine, 71, 9, 1541-1547. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.06.048
Weiner, K. (2009) The tenacity of the coronary candidate: How people with familial hypercholesterolaemia construct raised cholesterol and coronary heart disease, Health,13, 4, 405-425.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363459309103915
Weiner, K. (2009) Lay involvement and legitimacy: the construction of expertise and participation within H.E.A.R.T. UK, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 38, 2, 254-273.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0891241608316996
Weiner, K. and Durrington P. (2008) Patients’ Understandings and Experiences of Familial Hypercholesterolemia, Community Genetics, 11, 5, 273-282 http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000121398
Weiner, K. and Martin, P. (2008) A genetic future for coronary heart disease? Sociology of Health and Illness, 30, 3, 380-395. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2007.01058.x
Levitt, L., Weiner, K. and Goodacre G. (2005) Gene Week: a novel way of consulting the public, Public Understanding of Science, 14, 1, 67-79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963662505047824