Professor Emeritus · Sociological Author · Community Activist
Juanne Nancarrow Clarke
A career spent examining the medicalization of everyday life, how media portrays health across audiences, and the medical errors that cost lives.
I'm a medical sociologist who has spent my career exploring the social forces that shape health, for individuals, and for the public health system as a whole.
My research and writing return again and again to one question: how does the way we talk about health, in medicine and in media, shape the way we live?
That question has taken different forms,
medicalization, media portrayals of illness, and more recently, the experience of refugees and their
sponsors.
It's taken different shapes too: alongside
conventional publications, I've presented findings through poetry and reader's theatre.
FEATURED PROJECT
"You are downstream on the bank of a beautiful river... you jump in and pull people, one after another, out of the water.
This is what happens when we focus on problems downstream."
Over her career, Juanne has published more than 20 books, contributed chapters to numerous edited volumes, and written more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles for outlets including Health, Risk & Society, Social Science and Medicine, Ethnicity & Health, and Children & Society.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Health, Illness, and Medicine in Canada
9th Edition · Oxford University Press · 2026
Now in its ninth edition, this widely-used text has shaped how a generation of Canadian students understand health, illness, and medicine through a sociological lens.
When Medicine Goes Awry
University Of Toronto Press · 2022
A sociological examination of medical error — including the case of Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man who died after a 34-hour ER wait for an easily treatable condition — tracing how medicalization and the social determinants of health shape who gets hurt by the system meant to help them.
After the Welcome
University of Regina Press · May 2027
Based on interviews with 100 Syrian refugees, After the Welcome follows what comes after resettlement — the barriers, the discrimination, and the long work of turning a welcome into belonging.
Juanne Nancarrow Clarke is a professor emeritus from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She earned her PhD from the University of Waterloo.
She currently lives in Toronto, where she spends her time researching, writing, and spending time with her daughters and grandchildren.