Rachel Washburn

Rachel Washburn is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Health and Society Program at Loyola Marymount University. She received her doctorate in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. Rachel's areas of research and teaching expertise include science, technology, and medicine studies, environmental health, and qualitative research methods. She has two major lines of scholarship. The first explores the politics of knowledge production in the environmental health sciences. Rachel is currently working on a project that examines the development of human biomonitoring, a technique used to measure environmental chemicals in people, in the United States during the twentieth century. A second area of scholarship is Situational Analysis, a qualitative theory/methods package that offers cartographic strategies to analyze relationalities in research situations. At LMU, Rachel teaches courses on the sociology of health and illness, health and society, and science, technology, and society.