Photo of Ericka Johnson

Ericka Johnson

Deputy Head of Department, Professor

How are patients made by and in their interactions with healthcare and medical technologies? How are their bodies known and presented? What role does gender play and how do medical technologies (re)create gender for patients? 

Refracting bodies through technology

Technologies refract discourses. They articulate silent understandings, highlight cultural values, emphasize subtle ideas. Studying technological artefacts can help trace the discursive contours within which we live. And give us words to challenge them.

I research medical technologies and material discursive practices of the body. Employing theoretical tools from feminist science studies, I find my academic home at the juncture of STS and medical sociology.

Publications

2023

Ericka Johnson (2023) Robotics Research and Teaching with a Feminist Lens
Sofia Thunberg, Ericka Johnson, Tom Ziemke (2023) Investigating healthcare workers' technostress when welfare technology is introduced in long-term care facilities Behavior and Information Technology Continue to DOI
Katie Winkle, Donald McMillan, Maria Arnelid, Madeline Balaam, Katherine Harrison, Ericka Johnson, Iolanda Leite (2023) Feminist Human-Robot Interaction: Disentangling Power, Principles and Practice for Better, More Ethical HRI Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, p. 72-82 Continue to DOI
Maria Eidenskog, Ola Leifler, Johanna Sefyrin, Ericka Johnson, Mikael Asplund (2023) Changing the world one engineer at a time - unmaking the traditional engineering education when introducing sustainability subjects International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 24, p. 70-84 Continue to DOI
Katherine Harrison, Ericka Johnson (2023) Affective Corners as a Problematic for Design Interactions ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, Vol. 12, Article 41 Continue to DOI

Books

A Cultural Biography of the Prostate

What contemporary prostate angst tells us about how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality.

Omslaget på boken

About the book

We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson investigates what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts.

Read more about the book here.

Research Project

News

In media

Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies". 

Ericka Johnson interviewed by Taylor Fox-Smith, Macquarie University and the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia in a podcast, New Books Network.

To the podcast

Supervision

Organisation