International Health Humanities Network Membership

Amy is the Founder and Director of the Mental Health Collective (www.mentalhealthcollective.org.uk), which is the hub for unlocking the potential of social and collective approaches to mental health.  She is a social scientist, facilitator and policy analyst.

Her PhD (University of Cambridge 2009) focused on a new way of understanding power, and her research has featured on reading lists at the University of Cambridge, LSE and King's College London.  Her policy work sparked a major international campaign and led to a £1.4m investment by the UK government.

She has worked as an Advisor to the UK government, in senior leadership roles in charities and for a number of mental health organisations.  She has provided training for over 300 policy makers and co-edits a series of books on Reflective Teaching (Bloomsbury Press).

She has a first class BA Hons and MA SAR in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge and was awarded the Richards Prize for outstanding academic achievement.

I'm an associate professor of English recently appointed to coordinate a health humanities grant for my institution. I would like to join the group in order to learn more about research and pedagogical approaches and opportunities in the health humanities that can be adapted to St. Lawrence University's recently approved public health minor. I teach writing and literary theory; I recently taught a course on theories of the body for our First-Year Program. My short stories and criticism have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. In 2012, I received a grant in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts.

I am working as an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. For the past couple of years, selected Sanskrit and Medical graduates are working with me towards their PhD degrees. Recently we named this activity as 'Philosophy & Indian Systesms of Medicine.' We would like to expand this activity to offer course in Medical Humanities.

Our's is the first non medical department to admit BAMS graduates for PhD program. Faculty from School of Medical Sciences are doctoral committee members in our interdisciplinary department.

I am a PhD student in the Institute for Education at Bath Spa University (since October 2016) and a practising community musician and music educator, currently designing my research into improvisation in community music. My interests in this area include ways to explore and understand the significance of such practice, such as for wellbeing and identity, and my methodological interests include narrative, case studies and other approaches to qualitative research. I am experienced in delivering arts & health projects within community music - such as a hospital-based music project and several Singing for Health projects. As a composer, songwriter, improviser, performer and recording artist myself, I am also experienced in informally using music for my own private therapeutic purposes. Reflection on my professional and personal experiences has given me an interest in the ways in which music education, community music, music therapy and everyday uses of music inter-relate.

I am a PhD student in Music Therapy. My main focus is the use of group vocal improvisation in a mental health outpatient clinic.

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia. With a background in music therapy and gerontology, my primary research interests intersect with arts-based methodologies, ethics, and end of life care for individuals living with the experience of dementia.

Em Rabelais is an academic health ethicist with interests in health inequities and health humanities, with a primary focus on decentering whiteness* in health professions and research education and practice. Dr. Rabelais’s current research projects center on identification and enactments of unconscious racism and other discriminations within centered whiteness in health professional and research educational and clinical settings. They achieve this by centering patient and student narrative voices as the definers of discriminations from centered whiteness to assist in dismantling the transmission of learned, enacted centered whiteness in these settings. They also interrogate the embedded centered whiteness in educational and research documents (scholarly work, policy, accrediting bodies, etc.), as these dominating structures reveal their own narratives of oppression. Their use of narrative as method and ethics includes focusing on writing, eliciting, and contextualizing narratives to address, highlight, or otherwise inform research, clinical, or pedagogical questions. Narrative ethics in their work makes apparent the actors' positionalities within structural racism, white supremacy, and centered whiteness while simultaneously identifying stories and positionalities within dominant and non-dominant narratives. Dr. Rabelais's work (a) finds, records, and highlight these narratives followed by (b) contextualizing them for healthcare establishments (education, research, practice) in order to (c) mobilize compelling narratives that will work toward policy change.

*Centered whiteness defines social, political, and other normalities. These include what is defined as normal for race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, body size and shape, behavior, interpersonal interactions, communication, country of origin, religion, and all types of professionalisms.

Mark is a novelist, journalist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing, University of Brighton. A Registered Nurse who worked clinically in London he is a four time nominee for the PPA Columnist of The Year for his Nursing Times column  and the author of 'Gabriel's Angel' (Bluemoose 2010). His new novel;' Stranger Than Kindness' is due out at the end of 2013.

He has written for a wide range of journals and newspapers, from The Guardian to The British Medical Journal and magazines as varied as 'The Idler' and 'When Saturday Comes' in between. He has contributed to several books primarily as a commentator and is currently engaged in research into what happens to nurses when they are bruised or hurt by their experiences, with a particular interest in embodiment.

My background is in health psychology with expertise in mental health and disability, cultural diversity, participatory research and co-production. My research is encapsulated by four overarching, but inter-related themes which address issues in mental health, disability and wellbeing: improving access to services/interventions, user involvement, practice and service development and inclusion. My current funded research programmes focusses on (1)  conceptualisation of dementia in minority ethnic communities; (2) research participation from diverse ethnic communities (3) loneliness and social isolation in migrant communities; (4) detection and diagnosis of dementia in primary care for  Black Asian and Minority Ethnic communities; (5) Mental health resilience of slum dwellers in India; and (6) Improving access to breast screening services for South Asian and African Caribbean population. I have published widely on mental health and disability, ethnicity and service improvement. I co-ordinate the International Transcultural Mental Health Network (ITMHN) for research collaboration and knowledge exchange. 

I am a student at National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, where I am completing a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine and a Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine.