I am currently C-CRI PhD scholar in Health in Social Science at the University of Edinburgh where I am supervised by Dr Rosie Stenhouse and Dr Amy Chandler.
The Poetry and Multiple Sclerosis Study
In 2003, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), and it is my experience of living with, and talking about, MS which prompted my PhD research. I devised the Poetry and Multiple Sclerosis Study to explore how poetry written by people living with MS might affect or enhance our conversations about the condition.
Find out more about the PaMS Study by watching the film below or on the Poetry and Multiple Sclerosis website.
Research interests
- Using poetry to research and articulate lived experience of multiple sclerosis.
- Problematizing power dynamics between patients and research teams.
- The possibilities of poetic inquiry in qualitative research to represent fractured narratives.
- The possibilities of poetry to communicate qualitative research findings.
- Poetry as a collaborative and participatory act.
- The im/possibility of language to construct and communicate identity.
- Disability studies and activism.
Conferences
‘We laughed. We Cried: reflections of a located researcher.’
‘Changing Times, Changing Minds.’ University of Edinburgh. Online (2021)
‘Triptych: reflections of a located researcher.’
Medical Humanities: (In)Visibility”, the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Congress. Online (2021)
‘MS and “I”: challenging assumptions about voice and truth in poems about lived experience of multiple sclerosis.’
Public Health/Private Illness. Glasgow University. Online (2020)
‘content work produce form: Feminist Collective Writing in the Art Gallery.’
A performance presentation with J L Williams and other members of 12.
3rd European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Edinburgh (2019)
Conference Blogger for Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry.
3rd European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Edinburgh (2019)
(2017 – 2019)
Publications
‘It sounds messy. It sounds MSsy: poetic inquiry as a methodology for exploring lived experience of multiple sclerosis.’
The Honest Ulsterman (2019)
Previous research interests
- Presentations of trauma in the poetry of Sharon Olds and Kevin Powers.
- The theme of time in TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and David Jones’s ‘In Parenthesis’.
Georgi Gill 