Research

I am a social and medical anthropologist (MPhil, DPhil, Oxon) specialising in the anthropology of medicine and religion, with a former life as a historian of medicine and art (MA, Oxon).

My research focuses on mindfulness-based approaches to health and wellbeing, as a way of exploring ethical and epistemological questions about the cultivation of knowledge and care in contemporary life.

As mindfulness – a contemplative practice derived from Buddhist meditation – emerges on the frontline of evidence-based psychotherapy, my research highlights the paradoxes and innovations of the mindfulness movement, asking how conflicting understandings and practices of distress and care produce new forms of therapeutic subjectivity.

My DPhil (PhD) thesis, Once More to the Body: an Ethnography of Mindfulness Practitioners in the United Kingdom, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and drew on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to explore techniques of self-work among participants and practitioners of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy. I am currently writing this up for publication.