Sandra Caponi is graduated in Philosophy from the National University of Rosario, Argentina; and PhD in Logic & Philosophy of Science from the State University of Campinas, Brazil. Since 1993, she has been teaching at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil; where she is now Titular Professor in the Department of Sociology & Political Science. She was a visiting researcher in Paris VII and in the University of Buenos Aires; visiting Professor and researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris; and guest lecturer at the Collège de France and at the National University of Colombia. She published more than a hundred papers in different Latin American and European journals; and contributed in more than fifty anthologies. Besides to having organized many collective books, she published Da Compaixão à Solidariedade (Rio de Janeiro, 2000) and Loucos e Degenerados (Rio de Janeiro, 2012). Both books were reprinted, the first several times; and the second was also published in Spanish: Locos y degenerados (Buenos Aires, 2015).

Her areas of research are Philosophy, History and Sociology of Health Sciences; and it is in those areas that she concentrates her teaching activity in graduates and undergraduate studies. Her current area of interest is the history of psychiatry, the medicalization of life in contemporary society, she also developed studies concerning the works of Michel Foucault, whose ideas are always present in her problems of research.