Carmel is a PhD student in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. Her interdisciplinary project investigates the remaking of the self in cancer survivorship, with a particular focus on pleasure, embodiment and creativity. She uses arts-based research methods with a co-production approach and a feminist practice of care.

With a background in the UK and Australian cultural sectors, she has extensive experience of public engagement, facilitation and training, which she brings to her research and teaching assistant work.

Research

Renegotiating one’s sense of self in the face of a cancer diagnosis requires navigating biomedical power structures, gender and corporeal norms, and working with and within hegemonic cancer culture. Although the number of people surviving cancer is dramatically increasing, the lived experience of survivorship is complex. As well as recalibrating one’s sense of self, people living post-cancer are navigating their relationship with ‘survivorship’ as a concept, dealing with iatrogenesis, coping with the impact on their sexuality and renegotiating relationships.

Based on the significant role that pleasure and sexuality play in subject formation, and the place of art and creativity in facilitating the remaking of the self, Carmel’s PhD research project investigates the ways in which people renegotiate their embodied sense of self following a breast cancer diagnosis, using arts-based research methods to explore the place of pleasure, embodiment and creativity in this process.

PhD supervision

• Principal supervisor: Lucy van de Wiel
• Secondary supervisor: Anne Pollock

Further details

See Carmel's research profile