Sarah Blacker

Sarah Blacker is a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, specializing in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Her work critically examines how biomedical discourses individualize health risk while obscuring structural inequalities.

Her research analyzes the geneticization of health in North American institutions, investigating how public health campaigns and genomic medicine materials shift responsibility for health disparities onto individuals rather than societal factors. She currently leads the project Planning for Persistent Environmental Contamination: Public Health, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, and Technoscience in Canada, which studies citizen science initiatives in settler-colonial contexts where environmental contamination evidence is politically contested. This work explores negotiations between First Nations actors and government policymakers regarding knowledge production, focusing on epidemiological methods as arbiters of valid evidence.

Dr. Blacker actively contributes to decolonial scholarship through MPIWG events including the Decolonizing the Plan workshop series (2017-2018) and seminars on colonial planning and environmental contamination (2014-2016). Her methodology emphasizes situated knowledge and challenges Western scientific hegemony in environmental health science.