Karissa Robyn Patton

Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in Biomedicine, Self and Society

Biography

Background

Karissa Patton is a historian of gender, sexuality, health, and activism. She’s currently working as an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021 and 2022 she held a Canada Research Chair postdoctoral fellow in the Historical Dimensions of Women’s Health at Vancouver Island University. She earned her PhD (2021) at the University of Saskatchewan, her MA (2015) and BA (2013) at the University of Lethbridge. She’s co-edited and co-authored her work in Bucking Conservatism, Compelled to Act, and the Canadian Journal of Health History. Oral History is an important part of her research and was honoured to teach at the University of Lethbridge’s Oral History Summer Institute in 2021. Her work explores local histories of healthcare, health activism, and politics of health and medicine. Her current research program includes histories of women’s self-help and self-exam health services in the 1970s Canadian West and Indigenous women’s health and motherhood activism in 1970s Alberta, Canada. Using oral histories and community engagement methodologies, her next large project is a comparative the history of reproductive and sexual healthcare and activism in Canada and the UK from 1967 to the 1980s.

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