Dr Marian Peacock

RMN, MA, PhD

Population Health, School of Medicine and Population Health

Honorary Lecturer

M.Peacock@sheffield.ac.uk

Full contact details

Dr Marian Peacock
Population Health, School of Medicine and Population Health
Regent Court (ScHARR)
30 Regent Street
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S1 4DA
Profile

Having joined Scharr as a doctoral student, I completed my PhD in public health in 2012. Using the Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method, the work explored the shame and invidious social comparisons which are argued by psychosocial theorists to play a key role in explaining the damaging health and social consequences of life in unequal societies and the place of neoliberalism in sharpening these processes. Since then I have extended these perspectives into my research work which has been around prisons and end of life care, obesity and food practices and psychogenic seizure disorder.

In addition to my research I also teach on the MPH suite of courses in the areas of the social determinants and the use of narrative and biographical approaches in research.

Research interests

My research work is underpinned by my interest in how inequality impacts on lives, how this is resisted and the protections available to be drawn upon. Class and the place of class in understanding inequality and class as a protective resource are a particular focus. As a Marie Curie researcher on the Both sides of the fence study at Lancaster University, an action research study addressing end of life care in prisons, I drew on these perspectives in making sense of what is happening in the contemporary prison system.

I am also interested in how concepts and ideas drawing on psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic perspectives can be utilised in the research process to access and make sense of unconscious processes. My current research post exploring psychogenic seizures and the wider landscape of medically unexplained symptoms utilises these approaches.

Teaching interests

I teach on the MPH and the Masters in Clinical Research and am interested in extending social epidemiological understandings of inequality by drawing on wider sociological theorising around class and particularly fundamental causation theories. In addition I teach qualitative methods and, in particular, narrative and biographical approaches to research.