My research is organized in three thematic strands.
Tricky
care encounters, good and bad care, and ‘difficult’ patients
I have long term experience of studying ‘tricky’ care encounters – encounters where a lot is at stake and patients risk ending up in a tight corner. I have studied patients’ experiences of situations that they felt were dehumanizing or oppressing, as well as care professionals’ experiences of similar situations and the work they did to find ways out of these situations. Most recently, my work has looked into patients’ informal complaints, i.e. patients’ verbal complaints made directly to care professionals. My research has zoomed in on a peculiar intersection of different normative ideals around patients’ involvement in the development and evaluation of healthcare. As part of this research strand I have, together with colleagues Lisa Guntram and Ann-Charlotte Nedlund, contributed with conceptual work on the ‘difficult patient’.
Illness experience, gender, and patienthood
While all my work is analytically sensitive to power structures, I have specially highlighted norms around masculinity and sexuality in relation to illness experience and treatments. Using theories from sociology and gender studies and based on qualitative interviews with men with prostate cancer, I further developed the concept of repair work to make sense of what men do in the aftermath of prostate cancer treatment. Next to this, I also collaborated with a sexual therapist and contributed medical sociological perspectives to interview studies on sexual changes after prostate cancer treatment.
Knowledge production and healthcare policymaking
This third research strand involves recent work examining questions of knowledge production and healthcare policymaking. My work, as part of a larger project on Long Covid (PI: prof. Kristin Zeiler), looks at norms around the construction of evidence for healthcare policymaking, specifically so called “qualitative evidence”. Ongoing studies aim to highlight epistemological norms in these constructions, and also aims show ways forward to different, more inclusive types of evidence production.
Teaching
and collaboration
I have long teaching experience in the medical humanities at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, LiU. Together with colleagues at LiU and Durham University I have organised two international medical humanities PhD summer schools.
My current teaching covers theory of science, social science methodologies, research ethics, and academic writing.
I am currently the director of graduate studies for doctoral education in Technology and Social Change.
