I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK. I'm working on a cross-institution project called Epistemic Injustice and Healthcare (Wellcome, PI Havi Carel). The Nottingham team is me, Ian Kidd and Alice Monypenny.
I'm interested in the affective, existential and phenomenological dimensions of various forms of suffering, with the embodied dimension of these experiences as central.
I'm also interested in fundamental existential questions about how we relate to each other as embodied, vulnerable beings. I'm increasingly convinced that what unites a variety of interpersonal harms (epistemic injustices, affective injustices, whatever) is a failure to properly attend to our inherent vulnerability and subjection to cruel fate. Me and Allan Køster have been starting do develop these ideas with the notion of ground empathy.
My research spans a few different areas of philosophy, such as the philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, phenomenology and the philosophy of emotion and cognitive science. Examples of some of my research topics:
- Illness experiences that demonstrate the inextricability of the mental and physical. E.g. Functional Neurological Disorder (primarily functional seizures and tics), post-viral fatigue and related conditions (Fibromyalgia, Long Covid, CFS)
- Experiences of grief. Loss and trauma, from a phenomenological perspective.
- Narrative. Autobiographical self-narratives and their socially distributed construction
I sometimes analyse these dynamics through the theoretical lenses of both epistemic (knowledge-related) and affective (emotion-related) injustice.
I received my PhD in 2022 from the University of York, UK, where I was also part of the AHRC-funded project Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience, in both cases under the supervision of Matthew Ratcliffe. My thesis was the first dedicated philosophical study of CFS/ME. Before coming to Nottingham, I spent 18 months at Linköping University, Sweden, where I worked on a large-scale interdisciplinary project on Long Covid, and then a year at the University of Birmingham, UK, where I worked between the Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Philosophy, in part on Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology (Wellcome, PI Matthew Broome).