Sarah Blacker
Adjunct Professor
PhD
Degrees:
PhD (University of Alberta)
MA (McMaster University)
BAH (University of King’s College)
Bio:
Dr. Sarah Blacker is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2015 and held Postdoctoral Fellowships the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, before returning to Canada to take up a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at York University in 2020. She was a Lecturer in the M.A. Program in Science and Technology Studies at the Technical University of Munich from 2018-2020. She has taught in the Health and Society Program at York University since 2021.
Dr. Blacker’s research and teaching are centered around racial health inequities, environmental health, and data justice. Her research addresses racial health inequities through two current projects: 1) research on environmental health inequities and community-led environmental monitoring projects practicing data sovereignty in contexts of environmental contamination and climate change; and 2) research on the collection and uses of race-based health data with a focus on the uses of this data in the development of medical AI tools. This research examines initiatives underway to create algorithmic fairness at the level of technology development, while also examining how health care practitioners address and mitigate the forms of bias and discrimination endemic to medical AI tools that are already in use. Dr. Blacker’s recent research in these areas has been published in: The Lancet Digital Health; Social Studies of Science; The American Journal of Bioethics; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.