Jessica Polzer
Biographic Data
| ID | 309170 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Polzer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Polzer |
| SIGNATURE | POLZER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 74 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“If I want to tap into a cord blood bank later, I felt that I should do my part and donate”
Pediatric oncology caregiving as narrative repair
Drawing on Arthur Frank's conceptualization of narrative repair, we consider how pediatric oncology nurses restore and re-story the narratives of patients and families whose biographies have been thrown off course by the diagnosis and death of a child from cancer, as well as their own narratives as caregivers. Frank argued that when one's life story is shipwrecked by chronic or life-threatening illness, storytelling is way to reorient one's biogr…
I can't be the nurse I want to be
Ambivalent complicities and knowledge production
Using a critical reflexive process (An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 1992; Theory, Culture & Society, 13, 1996, 17), this article identifies and examines issues of power, complicity and knowledge production as they emerged in the first author's master's research on migrant women farmers' economic and reproductive health experiences in the middle belt of Ghana. We examine the ambivalent positionality of the international graduate student rese…
The power of potential
Despite their low and inconsistent rates of success, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) are presented by fertility clinics and constructed in media and popular culture as an effective treatment for infertility. The ways in which such technologies medicalize women's health and bodies have been well documented by social scientists and feminist health researchers. However, little is known about the struggles women face in cases of "failure"; …
Everything is down to the minute’
This article presents a key finding from a reflexive ethnographic study of the work disabled people and their support networks do to organize self-managed attendant services: that disabled ‘self-managers’ and their ‘attendant’ employees perform relational work to increase autonomy in the context of austerity-driven systemic constraints. Through a temporal lens informed by feminist and disability studies perspectives, ‘clock time’ was seen to obsc…
HPV vaccination discourses and the construction of “at-risk” girls
Preparedness as a technology of (in)security
Risk, responsibility, resistance
The introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination has resulted in a proliferation of discourse about HPV-related health risks, with a particular emphasis on the link between HPV and cervical cancer. Using a discursive narrative approach, we critically examine how young women navigate and construct their identities in relation to discourses on HPV vaccination, and the master narratives of risk, medicalization and individual responsibility…
From Desire to Disease
This article critically examines the proliferation of information on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination as integral to contemporary processes of medicalization that take the young female body and her nascent sexuality as its primary object and target. We suggest that the recent introduction of voluntary HPV vaccination for girls, in North America and elsewhere, constitutes a form of neomedicalization (Batt & Lippman, 2010 ) that links ris…
Habitus, Hysteresis and Organizational Change in the Public Sector
This paper examines the daily struggles of unionized employees whose municipal workplace was undergoing major change influenced by New Public Management. In-depth interviews with 45 front-line service providers revealed widespread frustration with working conditions and relationships with management. We interpret this response as an embodied expression of hysteresis, a term that Bourdieu used to describe the gap between changing field conditions …
Seeing and knowing in twenty-first century genetic medicine
This paper explores the clinical pedigree as a risk technique within the context of the predictive genetic testing (PGT) clinic. We situate the PGT clinic as a site of genetic governance in that it is a site both for the production of knowledge about genetic risk and for intervening in the everyday lives of individuals and their families who learn to cultivate their relations with themselves and their biological relatives in relation to genetic r…
Good girls do…get vaccinated
Current media representations of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination communicate a potent message that concerns about sexually transmitted infection (STI) are no longer restricted to sexually active “bad girls”. The mass marketing of vaccines against HPV – whether to serve industry efforts to establish markets for products or public health efforts to minimise STIs and cancer morbidity and mortality – firmly yet carefully inscribes the not-yet-…
You are free to set your own hours
"Workplace injury or "part of the job
Working at the margins' or 'leading from behind
Collaboration between hospitals and community organisations has been promoted over the past 20 years by various levels of government, hospital associations, health promotion advocates, and others at the state/province, national and international levels as a way to improve the 'efficiency of the system', reduce duplication, enhance effectiveness and service coordination, improve continuity of care, and enhance community capacity to address complex…
Blood is thicker than water
Genetic testing for late onset disease constitutes one aspect of a shift in the organization of public health according to a logic of risk that is based on the surveillance and regulation of normal populations. Using governmentality as a theoretical framework, this paper situates genetic testing as a neoliberal technique of governance that operates by invoking the power of individuals to make informed decisions about their health. Interview data …
You are free to set your own hours
Habitus, Hysteresis and Organizational Change in the Public Sector
This paper examines the daily struggles of unionized employees whose municipal workplace was undergoing major change influenced by New Public Management. In-depth interviews with 45 front-line service providers revealed widespread frustration with working conditions and relationships with management. We interpret this response as an embodied expression of hysteresis, a term that Bourdieu used to describe the gap between changing field conditions …
"Workplace injury or "part of the job
From Desire to Disease
This article critically examines the proliferation of information on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination as integral to contemporary processes of medicalization that take the young female body and her nascent sexuality as its primary object and target. We suggest that the recent introduction of voluntary HPV vaccination for girls, in North America and elsewhere, constitutes a form of neomedicalization (Batt & Lippman, 2010 ) that links ris…
Everything is down to the minute’
This article presents a key finding from a reflexive ethnographic study of the work disabled people and their support networks do to organize self-managed attendant services: that disabled ‘self-managers’ and their ‘attendant’ employees perform relational work to increase autonomy in the context of austerity-driven systemic constraints. Through a temporal lens informed by feminist and disability studies perspectives, ‘clock time’ was seen to obsc…
I can't be the nurse I want to be
HPV vaccination discourses and the construction of “at-risk” girls
Risk, responsibility, resistance
The introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination has resulted in a proliferation of discourse about HPV-related health risks, with a particular emphasis on the link between HPV and cervical cancer. Using a discursive narrative approach, we critically examine how young women navigate and construct their identities in relation to discourses on HPV vaccination, and the master narratives of risk, medicalization and individual responsibility…
Working at the margins' or 'leading from behind
Collaboration between hospitals and community organisations has been promoted over the past 20 years by various levels of government, hospital associations, health promotion advocates, and others at the state/province, national and international levels as a way to improve the 'efficiency of the system', reduce duplication, enhance effectiveness and service coordination, improve continuity of care, and enhance community capacity to address complex…
The power of potential
Despite their low and inconsistent rates of success, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) are presented by fertility clinics and constructed in media and popular culture as an effective treatment for infertility. The ways in which such technologies medicalize women's health and bodies have been well documented by social scientists and feminist health researchers. However, little is known about the struggles women face in cases of "failure"; …
Blood is thicker than water
Genetic testing for late onset disease constitutes one aspect of a shift in the organization of public health according to a logic of risk that is based on the surveillance and regulation of normal populations. Using governmentality as a theoretical framework, this paper situates genetic testing as a neoliberal technique of governance that operates by invoking the power of individuals to make informed decisions about their health. Interview data …
Working at the margins' or 'leading from behind
Collaboration between hospitals and community organisations has been promoted over the past 20 years by various levels of government, hospital associations, health promotion advocates, and others at the state/province, national and international levels as a way to improve the 'efficiency of the system', reduce duplication, enhance effectiveness and service coordination, improve continuity of care, and enhance community capacity to address complex…
"Workplace injury or "part of the job
You are free to set your own hours
Good girls do…get vaccinated
Current media representations of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination communicate a potent message that concerns about sexually transmitted infection (STI) are no longer restricted to sexually active “bad girls”. The mass marketing of vaccines against HPV – whether to serve industry efforts to establish markets for products or public health efforts to minimise STIs and cancer morbidity and mortality – firmly yet carefully inscribes the not-yet-…
Seeing and knowing in twenty-first century genetic medicine
This paper explores the clinical pedigree as a risk technique within the context of the predictive genetic testing (PGT) clinic. We situate the PGT clinic as a site of genetic governance in that it is a site both for the production of knowledge about genetic risk and for intervening in the everyday lives of individuals and their families who learn to cultivate their relations with themselves and their biological relatives in relation to genetic r…
From Desire to Disease
This article critically examines the proliferation of information on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination as integral to contemporary processes of medicalization that take the young female body and her nascent sexuality as its primary object and target. We suggest that the recent introduction of voluntary HPV vaccination for girls, in North America and elsewhere, constitutes a form of neomedicalization (Batt & Lippman, 2010 ) that links ris…
Habitus, Hysteresis and Organizational Change in the Public Sector
This paper examines the daily struggles of unionized employees whose municipal workplace was undergoing major change influenced by New Public Management. In-depth interviews with 45 front-line service providers revealed widespread frustration with working conditions and relationships with management. We interpret this response as an embodied expression of hysteresis, a term that Bourdieu used to describe the gap between changing field conditions …
Risk, responsibility, resistance
The introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination has resulted in a proliferation of discourse about HPV-related health risks, with a particular emphasis on the link between HPV and cervical cancer. Using a discursive narrative approach, we critically examine how young women navigate and construct their identities in relation to discourses on HPV vaccination, and the master narratives of risk, medicalization and individual responsibility…
Preparedness as a technology of (in)security
HPV vaccination discourses and the construction of “at-risk” girls
Everything is down to the minute’
This article presents a key finding from a reflexive ethnographic study of the work disabled people and their support networks do to organize self-managed attendant services: that disabled ‘self-managers’ and their ‘attendant’ employees perform relational work to increase autonomy in the context of austerity-driven systemic constraints. Through a temporal lens informed by feminist and disability studies perspectives, ‘clock time’ was seen to obsc…
The power of potential
Despite their low and inconsistent rates of success, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) are presented by fertility clinics and constructed in media and popular culture as an effective treatment for infertility. The ways in which such technologies medicalize women's health and bodies have been well documented by social scientists and feminist health researchers. However, little is known about the struggles women face in cases of "failure"; …
Ambivalent complicities and knowledge production
Using a critical reflexive process (An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 1992; Theory, Culture & Society, 13, 1996, 17), this article identifies and examines issues of power, complicity and knowledge production as they emerged in the first author's master's research on migrant women farmers' economic and reproductive health experiences in the middle belt of Ghana. We examine the ambivalent positionality of the international graduate student rese…
I can't be the nurse I want to be
Pediatric oncology caregiving as narrative repair
Drawing on Arthur Frank's conceptualization of narrative repair, we consider how pediatric oncology nurses restore and re-story the narratives of patients and families whose biographies have been thrown off course by the diagnosis and death of a child from cancer, as well as their own narratives as caregivers. Frank argued that when one's life story is shipwrecked by chronic or life-threatening illness, storytelling is way to reorient one's biogr…
“If I want to tap into a cord blood bank later, I felt that I should do my part and donate”
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Public relations (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Context (archaeology (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works)