I graduated from Durham University in July 2025 with a first-class honours degree in Sociology, and I will begin the MA Social Research Methods programme at Durham in October 2026. I will then begin my PhD in Northumbria under the supervision of Dr Órla Meadhbh Murray, Dr Elisabeth Griffiths and Dr Jesse Proudfoot. My PhD project aims to investigate the disjuncture between lived experiences of chronic pain and the institutional logics through which pain is assessed and managed. The proposed project will utilise Institutional Ethnography, undertaken via 25 interviews with disabled students in higher education who experience chronic pain.
Rather than studying institutions from above, this research will begin ‘from below’, foregrounding the situated knowledge of disabled people navigating healthcare, university disability services, and welfare systems. From these experiences, the project will ‘map’ the textual and discursive framing of disabled peoples’ experiences of chronic pain across institutions which organise the perceived (il)legitimacy of experiences of chronic pain and access to support, to show how institutions make pain (il)legible. The proposed project will utilise a combination of crip theory/critical disability studies and affect theory as its theoretical framework.
