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Welcome to Thinking In Between. We explore how social theory and qualitative methods can illuminate the messy world of health and healthcare. In each episode, we invite a researcher working at the borderlands of social science and health to choose three “big ideas” that have influenced their research journey and the way they think.
19 Episodes
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This episode of Thinking In Between hears from Dr Sara Paparini, a medical anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Equity at the Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London. Sara's research began in HIV but has expanded to applying critical public health and anti-racist lenses to many other areas. Sara shares three big ideas with us in this episode:
Knowledge is Power - "Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism" by Catherine Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Differences in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" by Rana Hogarth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 156-157
Ian Hacking on "Making People Up". The particular lecture that Sara discusses is Kinds of People: Moving Targets, which he presented at the British Academy in 2007. Another key text is "The Taming of Chance" by Ian Hacking (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Racialisation - a particular malevonent form of "making people up", which Sara uses Hacking's work to understand. Sara shares from "Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation" by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Verso, 2022)
Our guest today is Dr Sam Miles, Reader in Social Science at Barts and the London Medical School, Queen Mary University of London. He leads social science teaching across the medical school. Today, he talks about what it's like to work in that role, and shares three ideas who have most influenced his work and thinking:
1) Helen Bamber: a remarkable leader and human rights advocate
2) Legacies: particularly through Sam's work on the children's author David Rees, who died from HIV/AIDS
3) Learning "From the Horse's Mouth" - who do you choose to teach and to learn from?
In this episode, we're joined by Professor Claire Cameron and Dr Deniz Arzuk from the Social Research Institute in University College London. They bring three ideas that have shaped their work and thinking:
1) Social Pedagogy is a discipline common in much of continental Europe that reframes professional "care" provided to children, focusing on ethics, justice, meaningful activities, and relationships.
2) Act Early is a research study about "early life changes to improve the health and opportunities for children living in areas with high levels of child poverty". Here, Claire and Deniz describe learning from working closely with local councils, and what counts as evidence.
3) Urban Childhoods is a forthcoming book (UCL Press, 2025) edited by Claire, which explores "Growing up in inequality and hope". In this part of the discussion, Claire and Deniz how the sociology of childhood adds value to public health and urban studies.
In this episode, we speak to Professor Kari Lancaster from the University of Bath. Kari speaks about her career journey so far, coming from performance studies to policy studies and then into science and technology studies (STS) "sideways". Kari is recognised for contributing empirical social science research in her specific fields of focus (drugs and addiction, and infectious disease including hepatitis C, HIV, and Covid-19). In this episode - which also took place as a live seminar - Kari shares three ideas that have shaped her thinking and research:
Problematisation (Carol Bacchi, Michel Foucault)
Ontological politics (John Law, Annemarie Mol)
Coming to science and technology studies (STS) "sideways"
Thinking In Between is back! On this episode, we welcome Dr Natassia Brenman, who is a senior qualitative researcher at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. Nat's research focuses on the challenges around improving access to healthcare and how technologies influence health practices. Today, she discusses three big ideas that have influenced her research and thinking:
Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books.
Lury, C. and Wakeford on ‘Inventive methods’ – Introduction to Inventive Methods: The happening of the social. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 25–36
Donna Haraway, and more recently Jasbir K Puar on ‘Cyborgs and Goddesses.
Puar JK. “I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory. In: Feminist Theory Reader. 5th ed. Routledge; 2020.
This month, Professor Louise Younie from the Institute of Health Sciences Education at QMUL shares three ideas that have shaped her journey as an academic, a general practitioner, a person living through cancer diagnosis and treatment, and a creative teacher. Louise's work focuses on using creative enquiry to explore professional identity formation, human flourishing, and humanising medicine.
1) Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire. Seabury Press, 1970
2) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing by Miranda Fricker. Oxford University Press, 2007
3) Flourishing Spaces website - https://www.creativeenquiry.co.uk/
Episode Notes
In this episode, our guest is Jen Randall, Senior Lecturer in Global Public Health at Queen Mary University of London. Jen believes in the transformative potential of teaching, and we hear stories of this through the episode. She shares three ideas which have changed her thinking and pedagogical approach:
1) Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues by Paul Farmer. University of California Press, 1999
2) High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society by Carl Hart. HarperCollins, 2013
3) Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. Routledge, 1994
In this episode, we welcome Iona Hindes from the Centre for Public Health and Policy at Queen Mary University of London. Iona is an anthropologist studying the unequal impacts of Covid-19 policies on maternity healthcare experiences. She introduces three ideas, how they have challenged her, and what they have allowed her to see differently:
1) Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered by Cynthia Enloe. University of California Press, 2013
2) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, by Kimberle Crenshaw. Stanford Law Review, 1991
3) The Health Disparities Research Industrial Complex by Jerel Ezell. Social Science and Medicine, 2024
In this episode of Thinking In Between, we welcome Elspeth Davies. Elspeth is an anthropologist finishing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on social and ethical dimensions surrounding efforts to diagnose risk and prevent cancer. On this episode, she shares three ideas that have shaped her work and thinking:
The notion of acquiring bodies - McDonald, M. 2014. ‘Bodies and cadavers’. In The Routledge Companion to Objects and Materials. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Yates‐Doerr, E. 2020. Reworking the Social Determinants of Health: Responding to Material-Semiotic Indeterminacy in Public Health Interventions. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34, 378–397
Opportunities and ethical issues when using Facebook ethnography
Death Without Weeping, Extimacy, and Biopolitics (Esca van Blarikom)
On this episode of Thinking In Between, we welcome Esca van Blarikom, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in New York State. Esca is an anthropologist who recently completed her PhD exploring the experiences of working-age adults with physical and mental co-existing health conditions. She is now working on a project to understand biopolitics in the post-Covid19 era. On this episode of Thinking In Between, she shares three ideas that have influenced her research and thinking:
1) "Death Without Weeping" by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, University of California Press
2) Lacan's concept of extimacy
3) Foucault's concept of biopolitics
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Totality, Edward Said, and Tensions in Global Health (Aida Hassan)
On this episode of Thinking In Between, we welcome Aida Hassan, who is a PhD student at the Centre for Public Health and Policy, Queen Mary University of London. Aida's research on global health draws on insights from international relations and political sociology.
Today, she shares how three ideas have shaped her thinking, teaching, and research:
1) The concept of totality
2) The work of Edward Said, particularly his book Orientalism
3) The tensions between global health and (inter)national security - here, Aida speaks about the paper "Global Health Security: Security for whom? Security from what?" by Simon Rushton (Political Studies, 2011)
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Community Up Research Values, Online Interviewing, and Advocacy (Cervantée Wild)
On this episode of Thinking In Between, we are joined by Cervantée Wild who is a research fellow at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. Cervantée is from New Zealand and her research journey began within a research group that paid close attention to health equity as a multicultural team. She shares about her research journey and brings three ideas:
Community Up Research Values - Cram, F., & Phillips, H. (2012). Claiming Interstitial Space for Multicultural, Transdisciplinary Research Through Community-up Values. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 5(2), 36-49. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v5i2.89
Challenges posed by online interviewing and data collection
Can researchers be advocates?
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Critical Theory, Multiplicity, and Deleuze and Guattari (Jackie Walumbe)
Welcome back to the podcast! Our guests now come from beyond our research group and university, so we have a new name to reflect this - "Thinking In Between". Our format and focus remain the same: exploring big ideas shaping researchers at the borderlands of social science and health.
Jackie Walumbe is a clinical academic physiotherapist with research and clinical interests in pain. She is based at University College London Hospitals (UCLH). Her PhD research focused on chronic pain management within and outside of specialist pain services. Jackie discusses the following three ideas:
Critical Theory
Multiplicity - Annemarie Mol and Scott Graham
Assemblages and the work of Deleuze and Guattari
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Systems Theory, Dialectical Critical Realism, and Boundary Spanning (Sophie Spitters)
Sophie Spitters is a Research Associate in the APOLLO Social Science team at Queen Mary University London, and will soon be taking up a new role within an interdisciplinary team at the University of Birmingham. She speaks about her journey from physics to psychology to the social sciences, and explains three ideas that have influenced her work and thinking. You can follow links to the texts that Sophie references below:
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1950): An Outline of General System Theory
Alan Norrie (2010): Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice
Catherine French (2016): Bench to Bedside? Boundary Spanning in Academic Health Science Centres
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Designing Interactions, The Body Multiple, and Living a Feminist Life (Alison Thomson)
Alison Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in Patient Public Involvement and Public Engagement in Science in the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London. Alison has a background in design and a brilliant example of her work bringing a design perspective to medicine can be seen at www.digestingscience.co.uk
She brings three ideas for this episode
Designing interactions by Bill Moggridge (MIT University Press, 2006)
The Body Multiple by Annemarie Mol (Duke University Press, 2003)
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Duke University Press, 2017)
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Episode Notes
Natalia Concha works as a research fellow working in the ActEarly programme at the Centre for Primary Care at Queen Mary University of London. Natalia is from Colombia and has a research background in sociocultural psychology. Both of these elements of her background have influenced her approach to health research, and she brings three big ideas to the podcast:
What can be said? Identity as a constraint on knowledge production by Gillespie and Cornish (Papers on Social Representation, 2010) - https://psr.iscte-iul.pt/index.php/PSR/article/view/381
Underground Sociabilities by Jovchelovitch & Priego-Hernández (UNESCO, 2013) - https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/53678/1/Priego-Hernandez_2013_Underground_sociabilities.pdf
"Together against the computer" by de Roux (chapter in "Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research" by Orlando Fals-Borda and Muhammad Anisur Rahman, Apex Press, 1991)
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Narrative Medicine, Righteous Dopefiend, and Co-production in Research (Stephen Hibbs)
Stephen Hibbs is a haematologist by background and recently commenced a PhD in the APOLLO Social Science group, aiming to understand what constitutes good hospital care for people experiencing a sickle cell crisis. In this episode, Stephen is interviewed by Lucie Hogger about three ideas that have developed his thinking as a clinician and researcher and which inform his research plans:
The Wounded Storyteller - Arthur Frank (University of Chicago Press)
Righteous Dopefiend - Jeff Schonberg and Philippe Bourgois (University of California Press)
Co-production in research
The APOLLO Social Science research group is based at Queen Mary University of London. You can find out more about Stephen's work and the APOLLO Social Science group at https://www.apollosocialscience.org/
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Evidence-based medicine, the Mystery of General Practice and Bakhtin
In our second episode of the APOLLO Social Science podcast, we hear from Professor Deborah Swinglehurst who is Professor of Primary Care and the leader of the APOLLO group.
How to read a paper - Trisha Greenhalgh (Wiley Blackwell, first published 1997)
The Mystery of General Practice - Iona Heath (Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, 1995)
The work of Mikhail Bakhtin - see Nina and Deborah's recent paper (Fudge N, Swinglehurst D. Keeping in balance on the multimorbidity tightrope: A narrative analysis of older patients' experiences of living with and managing multimorbidity. Soc Sci Med. 2022 Jan;292:114532) for an example of his influence.
The APOLLO Social Science research group is based at Queen Mary University of London. You can find out more about Deborah's work and the APOLLO Social Science group at https://www.apollosocialscience.org/
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Practice theory, trust and artificial intelligence
The social sciences give us tools to understand the human and moral dimensions of health care. This podcast explores the borderlands of social theory and health by inviting researchers to share the ideas that have inspired and shaped their own thinking and practice. In this first episode, we hear from Duncan Reynolds, a postdoctoral researcher in the APOLLO research group who is working on the AI Multiply project.
The three ideas that Duncan speaks about are:
Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction Book - by Davide Nicolini (OUP, 2012)
‘Trust my doctor, trust my pancreas’: trust as an emergent quality of social practice - by Simon Cohn (Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 2015)
‘If You’re Going to Trust the Machine, Then That Trust Has Got to be Based on Something’: Validation and the Co-Constitution of Trust in Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Early Diagnosis of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) - by Winter and Carusi (Science and Technology Studies, 2022)
The APOLLO Social Science research group is based at Queen Mary University of London. You can find out more about Duncan's work and the APOLLO Social Science group at https://www.apollosocialscience.org/
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