Ethnographic Explorations

In order to make space for disabled, chronically ill and ventilated people to speak with and back to respiratory physicians and services, communicating the lived and embodied experiences of ventilated lives, this work package applies collaborative and creative ethnographic approaches specifically to patient ventilation journeys - from diagnosis and intervention, to longterm use and living on and with ventilatory technologies.

Ethnographic approaches will 'follow' such technologies from respiratory clinics (Northern General Hospital, Sheffield) to the home to explore clinicians' and patients' understandings, expectations and negotiations of ventilator practice over time. 

We specifically explore instituting/beginning ventilation as a health intervention; its relationship to issues of 'patient compliance'; the temporal and negotiated understandings of quality of life and ventilated futures and the 'activity spaces' regarding ventilator use (Walker et al. 2019).

This Stream will be supported by a Clinical Advisory Group at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, our co-investigator Dr Rod Lawson, and our Research Associate Dr Julie Ellis. 

I am a sociologist interested in everyday experiences of illness, dying and bereavement. In my previous work I have explored relationships, social identity and material culture in a range of contexts, including hospices, mortuaries and online support groups. I completed my PhD about family practices and life-threatening illness at the University of Sheffield in 2011 and subsequently held several research positions there, including one with the award-winning End or Start of Life project. I moved to the University of Huddersfield in 2018 as a senior lecturer in sociology of health and illness where I co-led the university’s palliative and end of life care special interest group. Aside from my exciting role as an ethnographer with the Cripping Breath team, I am also an editorial board member of the interdisciplinary journal Mortality and a Council member of Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS).