Film, Storytelling, and Conspiracies is project funded by an interdisciplinary academic research incubator that seeks to uncover the practice-related, regulatory, philosophical, religious, and socio-technical conundrums of re-telling conspiratorial stories, and creating space for new conspiratorial stories, that are raised (or resolved) by digital making.
We have been awarded funding by the Wellcome Trust to explore the notion of epistemic injustice and its applications in healthcare. The project, funded by a 6-year Discovery Award, is led by Havi Carel at Bristol University. Also features Ian Kidd, Matthew Broome, and Sheelagh McGuinness.
"Agency, Justice and Social Identity in Youth Mental Health" was a collaborative Research Project led by Rose McCabe at City University (2020-2022), involving young people and academics working in Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry, Ethics and Neuroscience. We posited that agency is a vital component of adolescent mental health, and are seeking to explore how it can be fostered in social interactions in youth mental health care. The study was awarded a £100k by a MRC/AHRC/ESRC Adolescence, Mental Health and the Developing Mind Engagement Award. Co-applicants included Matthew Broome (Birmingham), Michael Larkin (Aston), Rachel Temple (McPin's Young People's Network).
"A new methodology linking interactional and experiential approaches, and involving young people as co-analysts of mental health encounters" was a collaborative research project led by Michael Larkin at Aston University (2022-2024). The study was awarded a MRC/AHRC/ESRC Adolescence, Mental Health and the Developing Mind Methodological Innovation Award. Co-applicants included Matthew Broome, Rose McCabe, Rachel Temple and Clara Bergen.
The Agential Ladder: Communication techniques to support agency in clinical encounters
I was awarded a 12-month non-residential fellowship (worth $76,299) as part of the Hope and Optimism funding initiative supported by the John Templeton Foundation and managed by the universities of Cornell and Notre Dame in the United States. The project aimed to: (1) clarify what the optimism bias is and how it works; (2) investigate its effects on rationality, the acquisition of knowledge, and moral behaviour. The research fellow on the project was Anneli Jefferson.
PERFECT (Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts) aimed to establish whether cognitions that are inaccurate in some important respect can be good for us from a pragmatic or epistemic point of view.
I was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (€ 1,900,075) to study the pragmatic and epistemic features of pathological and non-pathological cognitions. The five-year project, PERFECT, started in October 2014 and ended in September 2019. The research team included post-doctoral researchers and PhD students. Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Kathy Puddifoot, Andrea Polonioli and Sophie Stammers all contributed to PERFECT as post-doctoral research fellows. Magdalena Antrobus got her PhD in November 2017, and Valeria Motta in December 2020. Doctoral students Alex Miller Tate, Matilde Aliffi, and Eugenia Lancellotta acted as research assistants in the last year of the project and have now all successfully completed their PhDs. PERFECT also benefited throughout from the active participation of clinical psychologist Michael Larkin (Aston University).
From September 2013 for 12 months I was funded by an AHRC Fellowship (Science in Culture theme) to pursue an investigation of the potential epistemic benefits of delusional beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations. Ema Sullivan-Bissett worked with me on the project as a part-time research fellow.
In 2013 I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Small Grant in the Ethics & Society stream to organise an interdisciplinary one-day workshop on moral responsibility and psychopathology. With the grant co-applicants, Matthew Broome and Matteo Mameli, I asked what the relationship should be between an agent's diagnosis of mental illness and an attribution of less than full moral responsibility to that agent.
A project entitled "Rationality and Sanity: Implications of a Diagnosis of Mental Illness for Autonomy as Self Governance" was funded by the Wellcome Trust with a Research Expenses Grant (January-June 2011). I looked at the relationship between rationality and sanity and its consequences for diagnosis in psychiatry.
From July to December 2008 I was Endeavour Research Fellow at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (now ARC Centre of Excellence of Cognition and its Disorder) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, working on a project on rationality and self-knowledge in delusions. The Fellowship was funded by the Department of Science, Education and Training of the Australian Government. In my time at Macquarie I participated in the Delusions and Hypnosis reading group together led by Max Coltheart, Robyn Langdon, and Amanda Barnier.
From January to end of April 2009 I was on AHRC-funded leave to complete a number of articles on delusions and a monograph for Oxford University Press in the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry Series. My research question was: Are ownership and authorship of thoughts necessary for intentionality and rationality?
