Dr. Rebecca Yoshizawa
BA (SFU), MA (SFU), PhD (Queen's)
Chair, Sociology Department (on educational leave until August 2025)
Dr. Rebecca Yoshizawa has a PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University, with other degrees in Gender Studies and Communication from SFU. She specializes in the sociology of science, transdisciplinary collaboration, bioethics, and reproduction. Her current research concerns paleontology, fossils, and the Anthropocene. In addition to her teaching at KPU, she has taught courses on reproductive politics, nonhumanism, new media, risk communication, and gender and technology in the School of Communication and in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at SFU. She has published articles on intersections of science and society in Body & Society, Feminist Theory, Placenta, the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, Health Sociology Review, and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
- Meet Me video
- Instagram: @rebecca.yoshizawa
Courses taught
Areas of Interest
Sociology of science, medicine, and technology; philosophy of science; paleontology and fossils; Anthropocene; reproductive sciences and reproductive politics; developmental origins science; fat studies; nonhumanism and animals; ethnography; transdisciplinarity
Scholarly Work
- Schrödinger’s placenta: Determining placentas as not/waste
- Postpartum Women's Perspectives on the Donation of Placentas for Scientific Research in Campinas, Brazil
- Fetal–Maternal Intra-action: Politics of New Placental Biologies
- Public perspectives on the utilization of human placentas in scientific research and medicine
- The Barker hypothesis and obesity: Connections for transdisciplinarity and social justice
- Risk for cardiovascular disease after pre-eclampsia: differences in Canadian women and healthcare provider perspectives on knowledge sharing
- Gender in Canada: A Companion Workbook