Claire Laurier Decoteau is associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches courses in social theory, the sociology of knowledge, and health and medicine. She is also a research associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She lives in Chicago.

She is currently working on two new projects. The first focuses on epistemic contestations over definitions of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She has engaged in archival research on the US federal vaccine court proceedings on autism where the controversial link between childhood vaccinations and autism development was forced to stand trial. And she has begun to collect qualitative research with Somali refugee parents of children with autism in Minneapolis and Toronto. She is interested in understanding what makes a group of people forge a knowledge community around a particular theory of causation. The second project focuses on women working in South Africa’s informal economy and explores the relationship between ‘transactional’ sexual practices and sex work in contemporary Johannesburg.

Her project was selected as the recipient of American Sociological Association Dissertation Award in 2009.