Sam is a Senior Research Associate in Ethnography, based within a multidisciplinary research team that is funded by an MRC/Versus Arthritis grant, the Advanced Pain Discovery Platform’s Consortium to research individual, interpersonal and social influences in Pain (CRIISP). The ethnographic research will identify and characterise psychosocial aspects of living with long-term chronic pain. More specifically, Sam will examine how people living with pain experience life and social transitions, how their social and physical environments impact on their pain and the ways in which they are able to influence those environments. She is concerned with direct and indirect effects of the wider social and health context on pain, including socioeconomic position; social embeddedness or isolation; living conditions; and occupation. 

Sam’s PhD (2020, University of Bath) and MRes (2015, University of Bath) were both in Education and funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC). Her ethnographic doctoral research explores children’s school mealtime socialisation from a child-centred perspective. She examined carnivalesque features of school mealtime events, drawing on contextually situated analyses of children’s subversion of school mealtime social order. Drawing on Bakhtin (1968; 1991), Goffman (1975), and Sociocultural theorising she examined the dialogic space of children’s socialisation to understand how they are open, active and creative processes of interdependence and experimentation with contradiction between the self and the other. Sam is passionate about giving voice to children, co-creating and co-producing knowledge that facilitates a more equal relationship between the researcher and participants to enable two-way conversations.