I secured my PhD fellowship with Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Programme in Genomic Epidemiology and Public Health Genomics at the University of Leicester in 2023

About the PhD

I use the “What is the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach to problematise the concept of preconception health in England’s policy documents across various sectors, including national and regional policy, charities, and professional bodies. For a lay summary of preconception health, you can read my article in The Conversation UK: Four ways men and women can improve their health before trying to conceive.

A key innovation in my work is the involvement of both the public and professionals in co-analysing policy documents, using adapted WPR questions. This methodological development was co-created with Rebecca Muir (Queen Mary University London). If you are interested in reading more about this collaboration, you can find our paper here (available soon!).

The second strand of my project involves interviews with policymakers to critically examine how preconception health policy has been shaped, justified, and interpreted by those directly involved in its development. Informed by a poststructural approach to interviewing, I do not treat participants’ accounts as direct reflections of truth. Instead, I understand them as situated performances shaped by language, discourse, and institutional positioning. My analysis will focus on how meaning is constructed – what is said, how it is said, and what remains unsaid. This enables a critical reading of how policy narratives are produced and maintained, and how dominant understandings of preconception health are legitimised or contested over time.

My work sits at the intersection of feminist scholarship, policy, and medical sociology.

If you are interested in hearing more about my work, please reach out via email.