International Health Humanities Network Membership

Liz completed her doctorate entitled ' An investigation of experiences of reading for mental health and well-being and their relation to models of bibliotherapy' at the Univeristy of Sheffield in September 2011. The thesis focused on the service user experience of using reading literature for mental health in UK public libraries, and concluded that there are a number of unrealised benefits to reading literature that merit further exploration. The abstract is available here: http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2006/

She is interested in the contribution that the arts and humanities to well-being and aims to continue her work on bibliotherapy, further exploring four user-centred models of bibliotherapy that emerged from her PhD research.

Liz started her academic career in the humanities, and currently works in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health at the University of Sheffield.

Currently postgraduate student at University of Brighton, applying for doctoral funding to work across disciplines (fine art, creative writing, medicine). My initial training is in medicine (Southampton) and I was a consultant in chronic pain management/ psychotherapy for 17 years. I am a qualified psychodynamic psychotherapist, and also have an MA in spirituality. I have a BA and MA in Fine Art. I am particularly interested in breaking down boundaries, both academic and clinical, between disciplines. I see my work as taking place in the territory of the 'inbetween' and I am not interested in rejecting existing narratives, but rather in using the best (and worst?) of each to create new understanding.

Personally my work is informed by the experiences of being a woman and mother of four children in what was then a male dominated profession. I am also a manic depressive which I see as an aspect of my being that I celebrate rather than a disability.

I am a doctoral researcher working in the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics, part of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. I am broadly interested in the connection between discourse and social life, particularly in relation to health and wellbeing. My doctoral research uses corpus linguistic techniques to examine the discourses surrounding diabulimia - a disorder in which individuals with type 1 diabetes deliberately restrict their recommended insulin dosage to achieve radical weight loss - in the context of online support groups. I am also interested in health promotion and pharmaceutical advertising, and examine these through the scope of multimodal critical discourse analysis. I have worked as Editorial Assistant for the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (published by John Benjamins) since 2012.  

I am a Research Fellow (Qualitative) and Head of Qualitative Research for The Centre for Trials Research, College of Biomedical & Life Sciences, Cardiff University.

I began my research career at the Centre for Language and Communication Research training in interactional sociolinguistics. My doctoral research explored diagnostic uncertainty in genetics and society. Following this I developed international networks with discourse researchers and assisted in the launch of the Annual International Conferences on Communication, Medicine & Ethics and acted as Editorial Associate for the journal Communication & Medicine.

I moved to the South East Wales Trials Unit when it was first established in 2006, now Centre for Trials Research. I initially focused on the use of qualitative methods in infections. I then began to broaden my research portfolio to include the use of qualitative methods with vulnerable population groups, and children/young people and parenting, and using qualitative methods with trials.

I am a co-applicant on studies funded by NIHR (RAPID, SenITA, BATCH), ESRC (DM IN GENETICS), HCRW Research for Patient and Public Benefit (PLACEMENT, TRIDENT), and Charity Action for Children (MIST). I supervise students at Doctoral and Masters level, and am a Fellowship Advisor .

My research interests include:

• Health communication
• Patient voices
• Children, young people and parenting
• Infections
• Using qualitative methods with vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations
• Qualitative methods and trials
• Large-scale, multi-country qualitative research design

Jane Brooks, RN, PhD is a lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at the University of Manchester. Dr Brooks is the Deputy Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery and Editor of the Bulletin of the UK Association for the History of Nursing. Her early research in the history of nursing focused on the experiences of nurses in the higher education sector in the inter-war and early post Second World War era. More recently she has studied the work of nurses in elderly care in the mid-twentieth century. She is currently working on the history of nursing work in the Second World War and has published on the care of victims of typhus epidemics and the nursing work on the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  She is co-editor of a forthcoming text,One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854-1954. Dr Brooks has worked extensively with oral history and as both a nurse and historian is particulary interested how nurses used themselves as agents of healing in conflict and post-conflict environments.

Brown is Professor of Health Communication at De Montfort University. He has completed twelve books and over sixty refereed journal articles. Most notably, his books have included Evidence based health communication (with P. Crawford and R. Carter, Open University Press, 2006) and the prizewinning Evidence based Research: Dilemmas and debates in heath care (with P. Crawford and C. Hicks, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003). As well as health care, his work has ranged across fields such as linguistics, education and sociology. The core of his work has focused on the interpretation of practitioner and client experiences in health care, exploring how this may be understood with a view to improving practice and with regard to theoretical development in the social sciences, particularly concerning notions of governmentality and habitus from Foucauldian and Bourdieusian sociology and how the analysis of everyday experience can offer novel theoretical developments.

Freelance artist and craftsperson working in textiles and fibre art. I'm interested in care for the dying and creative opportunities in palliative care.   

Brian Brown is Professor of Health Communication at De Montfort University. He has completed ten books and over fifty refereed journal articles. Most notably, his books have included Evidence based health communication (with P. Crawford and R. Carter, Open University Press, 2006) and the prizewinning Evidence based Research: Dilemmas and debates in heath care (with P. Crawford and C. Hicks, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003). As well as health care, his work has ranged across fields such as linguistics, education and sociology. The core of his work has focused on the interpretation of practitioner and client experiences in health care, exploring how this may be understood with a view to improving practice and with regard to theoretical development in the social sciences, particularly concerning notions of governmentality and habitus from Foucauldian and Bourdieusian sociology and how the analysis of everyday experience can offer novel theoretical developments. Notably this has included The habitus of hygiene (with P. Crawford, B. Nerlich and N. Koteyko, Social Science and Medicine) 'Post antibiotic apocalypse': Discourses of mutation in narratives of MRSA, (with Paul Crawford, Sociology of Health and Illness), Soft authority: Ecologies of infection management in the working lives of modern matrons and infection control staff, (with Paul Crawford, Sociology of Health and Illness), The clinical governance of the soul (with P. Crawford, Social Science and Medicine) and Clinical governmentality (with P. Crawford and L. Mullany, Journal of Applied Linguistics).

May-Blossom Chinyelu Brown, Ph. D.  is a British-born Nigerian,  a practising holistic Healer and Herbalist who is at the forefront of enabling people own that they,  alone, can heal themselves.  She does this through her travels and free seminars, to different African countries, where she identifies local fauna and shows people how to prepare and use these herbs along with the eight pillars of health namely - Air & sunshine,  water,  diet, rest and  prayer - forgiveness & surrender, to heal. 

She holds a Ph. D. in Performance Arts(1998) from the University of Plymouth,  Exeter.   She return to Nigeria in 2006 from the USA to answer the call of her ancestral healing art which had chosen her as a High Priestess and Medicine woman, and for the following 9 years,  she underwent training in the healing practices of her people - the Igbo of South Eastern Nigeria. 

She is an ordained Minister of the UNITY extraction from the Barbara King School of Ministerial Studies (2004) in Atlanta,  GA. Before going into the Seminary,  she was a Speech & Humanities lecturer at the Acwortth College in Georgia,  USA. She has many years of experience as an English and Literature teacher in Secondary schools in Nigeria 

She us presently travelling 5 African countries participating in and doing Documentaries in Indeginous Healing Practices - a 2 year Project which began March 2018.

She is grandmother to twin boys - Calintz and Austin Horton  and when in Nigeria,  she lives and works at the Añuli Ashram where she is "GRANDMA" to 22 orphaned children at the HEART OF LOVE CHILDREN'S HOME (HOLCH)  at EBE,  Enugu State.  HOLCH,  ARU IKE SPECIALTY HOSPITAL & THE EMBODIMENT OF LOVE ACADEMY with 750 students are all part this thriving Ashram, and these services are delivered FREE OF ALL CHARGES to all irrespective of creed.

May-Blossom is also the Operations Manager working alongside Rev.  Fr. Charles Ogada,  CSSp. who is the Founder/CEO, Spiritan Del Awareness Initiatives, setting up TAIHTHE -  THE AFRICAN INSTITUTE OF HERBAL & TRADITIONAL HEALING,  EBE, which is a Research Institute into holistic and herbal healing. 

I have been a healthcare-related bioscience lecturer for 20 years and currently work in nurse education.  However,  I have recently completed a degree in creative writing. For my final year project I explored the use of lifestory telling to enhance the well-being of people with dementia. I intend continuing this work as a scholarly focus.