Ariane Hanemaayer is an associate professor at Brandon University (2016-present) and a visiting scholar at Egenis: Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom (2022–23). Prior to these positions, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Science and Humanities (CRASSH) (2019–21). After completing her PhD at the University of Alberta in sociology, with a specialization in theory and culture (2014), she held a Killam Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University (2015–16). Ariane’s research investigates the relationships among medical knowledge, healthcare systems and spaces, algorithmic decision-making technology, and medical governance and regulation. Her career has been guided by complimentary desires: to identify and explain the causes of failures within healthcare among knowledge systems, professions, governance, and science, and to connect that knowledge to care settings and broad audiences. Ariane has written two books, The Impossible Clinic: A Critical Sociology of Evidence-Based Medicine (2019) and Governing the Impossible System: A Critical Sociology of Public Health Policy (under contract with UBC Press), and edited two anthologies, Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents: Critiques from the Social Sciences and Humanities (2021), and The Public Sociology Debate: Ethics and Engagement (2014). Her new book, tentatively titled An Impossible Science: A Critical Sociology of Pain Management, investigates the intractability of pain in the clinic alongside the regulation of opioids in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States in order to provide an alternative understanding of the opioid crisis. This research is funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Selected Publications

Hanemaayer, Ariane, ed. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents: Critiques from the Social Sciences and Humanities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88615-8.

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Hanemaayer, Ariane, ed. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents: Critiques from the Social Sciences and Humanities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88615-8.

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Hanemaayer, Ariane, ed. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents: Critiques from the Social Sciences and Humanities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88615-8.

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Hanemaayer, Ariane (2019). The Impossible Clinic: A Critical Sociology of Evidence-Based Medicine. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

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Past Events

Presentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities

Socially Possible Worlds: Grounding Normative Statements beyond Ontological Actualism

20th International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, Melbourne Australia

Where It Hurts: The Making of Pain Medicine

Institute Vienna Circle, Vienna, Austria

The Depths of Deprivation: Theorizing in Life Expectancy between the North and South of England

“The Public Cost of Personal Hardship”: Evaluating the Hidden Expense of Cost-Cutting Measures on Social Wellbeing, University of Cambridge, UK, together with Niamh Mulcahy (University of Cambridge)

Are Continuity Claims a Challenge to Medical Classification?

Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, Exeter University, UK

Historicizing Critique(s) in Biomedicine (Institute's Colloquium)

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

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Nominalism in the Social Sciences: Promises and Pitfalls (Cambridge Philosophy of Science Seminar)

University of Cambridge, Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Doing Genealogy: Knowledge, Power, AI (Sawyer Seminar in Histories of AI: Genealogies of Power Virtual Events)

University of Cambridge

The Birth of Community Medicine: Problematizing Security (Colloquium Speaker’s Series on the History of Knowledge)

Humboldt-University of Berlin

Automated Judgments: Historicizing algorithms and AI in evidence-based medicine

University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

In Search of Biomedical Validity: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary History of Validation Practices

Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, University of Toronto Symposium, together with Simon Brausch, Sam Ducourant, Alfred Freeborn, Lara Keuck, Michele Luchetti, and Hanna Worliczek