Today we welcome Michael Vine to the Platform, who joins us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Health Inequalities with The Practice and Sociology Department. Michael holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and was previously a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He will use his fellowship to develop a collaborative project examining the impact of poverty, neighbourhood institutions, and kinship relations on primary care health outcomes in East Newcastle, with a focus on pain and opioid use.
Read on for our interview with Michael about his research and interests.
1. If your research was a film, what would the title be?
I think the title for my research project at The Platform would be something life: “My Neighbor In Pain.” The phrase seems to capture the fact that the East Newcastle neighbourhood I will be studying suffers from a high incidence of persistent pain, but also the idea—which is a crucial premise for the project—that a particular kind of neighbourliness might be constituted through the medium of shared physical and emotional pain.
2. What will you be doing during your postdoctoral research fellowship?
I’ll be working with a sociologist, Dr. Jesse Proudfoot, and GP, Dr. Jonny Coates, to develop a collaborative project examining the consequences of poverty for health outcomes at St Anthony’s Health Centre, a GP practice in East Newcastle, with a focus on pain and addiction. I am also interested, more broadly, in developing further my understanding of the impact of industrial contraction and relocation since the 1970s on urban space and family life in North East England. A final aim for the fellowship is to experiment with new ways of integrating the social and medical sciences.
3. What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on?
I trained as a social anthropologist, and my main expertise and experience are in ethnographic methods, which I think work best when they involve research subjects in developing accounts of their selves, lives, and experiences. My previous projects have attempted to work across scales, connecting these “experience-near” accounts of social life with “big” histories, such as the histories of climate change, imperialism, and the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. I also enjoy working across academic divides, and I hope that working with academics and practitioners that come from different disciplinary backgrounds will be a big part of how I spend my time at The Platform.
4. Why are you excited about working in The Platform?
A major virtue of The Platform is its experimental ethos: providing the space, time, and resources for academics, practitioners, and “experts by experience” to come together without necessarily knowing what exactly the outcome will be. At the same time, having the kind of access to St. Anthony’s Health Centre, its staff, and its patients that the collaboration offers is also a real privilege, and one I do not take lightly. After commuting for work to Germany for the past couple of years, I’m also excited to have a job in Durham, where I live with my partner and son.
5.What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
First and foremost my aim is to better understand the pathway from economic inequality to health inequality, or to put it another way: how histories of poverty get, in some cases very literally, under the skin. I believe that the only way to do this effectively is to develop new and better ways of listening to what people caught up in these inequalities are telling us, with their words and with their bodies. More generally, I hope our collaboration at St. Anthony’s Health Centre might offer a model, one among many possible models, for working together across anthropology and medicine in a spirit of mutual curiosity, generosity, and solidarity.
6. What interests or hobbies do you have outside your research that might surprise people?
I enjoy cooking, walking, building stuff with my son, and catching up with friends in Durham pubs.
We warmly welcome Michael to Durham and look forward to working with him over the next three years.
