2026 Renee Fox Lecture: Joanna Kempner, PhD, "Experiment Perilous, Revisited: Hope, Deceit, and Survival in Psychedelic Science"

Late in her career, Renée Fox worried that bureaucratic medicine had replaced the intimate experiments where courageous physicians and patients navigated uncertainty together. Kempner finds those spaces reconstituted in the psychedelic underground, where people failed by medicine offer support, trade information, test potential treatments, and collect data. In this talk, she asks what happens to those intimate experiments when the underground and the institutions that once ignored them begin to collaborate.

Joanna Kempner, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, where she studies how culture, politics, and institutions shape science and medicine—particularly what happens when they fail.

Kempner’s most recent, Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine (Hachette, 2024), chronicles how a patient-led community discovered that psilocybin could treat cluster headaches. Her earlier book, Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (Chicago, 2014), examined how stigma and gender bias shape the treatment of pain. Her award-winning research spans sociology, medicine, bioethics, and health policy, and is often covered by media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and PBS NewsHour. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

The Renée C. Fox Lecture in Medicine, Culture, and Society was established to honor the legacy of Dr. Fox, whose pioneering work in the sociology of medicine, medical research, and ethics deeply shaped multiple disciplines. Her commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and critical inquiry continues to inspire this annual event.