Kazuki Yamada

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I am a PhD researcher with dual affiliation across the University of Exeter (UK) and University of Queensland (Australia), as a recipient of a studentship from the joint QUEX Institute for Global Sustainability and Wellbeing. Within my broad fascination with interdisciplinary approaches to medicine, I am particularly interested in ageing and its intersections with topics such as sexuality and migration. I am supervised by Prof. Kate Fisher and Dr Jana Funke (Exeter), as well as Prof. Peter Cryle and Assoc. Prof. Elizabeth Stephens (Queensland). I am a member of Exeter's Wellcome Trust-funded Rethinking Sexology research project and Queensland's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), as well as a Centre Associate at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health.

My current project, 'A Genealogy of Later Life Sexuality: Sex and Time in Mid-Nineteeth to Late-Twentieth Century Science', serves as a qualitative contribution to the Healthy Ageing strand of the QUEX Institute and examines the formation of scientific knowledges around ageing and sexuality. I trace shifts in understandings of the sexual older person across the intellectual genealogies of the (Western) sciences of sex and ageing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards to understand how scientific thought has contributed to present-day Western stereotypes of sexual ageing. Within this, I pay particular attention to how sociohistorically specific models of sexual temporality operated as conceptual preconditions for the scientific formulation of diverse and often contradictory theories of sexual ageing. Ultimately, my research develops a basis for critiquing contemporary sexual ageism in health research by demonstrating its reliance on one, sociohistorically contingent version of the sexual life course as a normative definition of how sexuality exists in time. 

Prior to joining the QUEX Institute, I worked as a full-time research and communications consultant for the World Health Organization's Department of Ageing and Life Course in Geneva, Switzerland. I have also been affiliated with HelpAge International at their London secretariat. I hold an MA in Ageing & Society from the Institute of Gerontology, King's College London, and a BSc in Life Sciences (specialising in the Biomedical Sciences) from the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines.