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Experiences of parents raising children with Congenital Cytomegalovirus
Experiences of parents raising children with Congenital Cytomegalovirus
In 2025, I joined an interdisciplinary group of researchers working on Congenital Cytomegalovirus infection. CMV is a viral illness that can cause impairments in children whose mothers are infected during pregnancy. I was hired to analyse qualitative responses to the UK National Screening Committee consultation on Congenital Cytomegalovirus (cCMV). The consultation sought to gather the views of parents and family members of children with cCMV in order to inform policymaking. The findings of this analysis will be published in a forthcoming article.
Using creative methods to explore climate-change as a driver of displacement
Using creative methods to explore climate-change as a driver of displacement
In 2025, I worked as a research assistant on the UCL Grand Challenges funded project 'Displaced by Drought and Deshielo', which aims to investigate how climate change drives displacement from Venezuela to Colombia, and how climate impacts intersect with other drivers of migration such as precarious livelihoods, food insecurity, and health system collapse. We conducted qualitative interviews with Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia, and engaged a group of community members (both Colombian and Venezuelan) to co-create a mural about climate change and migration, in collaboration with Colombian muralist and street artist Oscar González (Guache).
Gender, disability, and care: an ethnographic study of Congenital Zika Syndrome
Gender, disability, and care: an ethnographic study of Congenital Zika Syndrome
My PhD research was an ethnography of families raising children with congenital zika syndrome in Barranquilla, Colombia. In my thesis, I draw on Latin American theory, in particular decolonial feminism and critical disability studies. In my thesis, I contribute to the literature on the political economy of care work and gendered reproductive labour, constructions of childhood disability, lay expertise and health system navigation, debility and disablement, and everyday activism.
The gendered nature of care work for children with disabilities is a central theme of my thesis. I use feminist political economy of gender as a lens to analyse mothers’ engagement in gendered care work in relation to the neo-liberal health care system. This leads to a discussion of the politicisation of motherhood under conditions of structural vulnerability. Following this I discuss the how mothers navigate health systems on behalf of their child. I use theories of cultural health capital and autoatención to analyse the development of lay expertise among the mothers. I show that they have formed an epistemic community and co-created knowledge about CZS in partnership with clinician researchers through their participation in the cohort study.
In addressing constructions of disability, I draw on critical perspectives from Latin America to illuminate and disrupt the deficit-based model that still predominates in global public health research on CZS. This paves the way for discussion of mothers’ alternative and plural understandings of their child’s disability. Finally, I discuss how mothers engage with ideas of time, progress and the future, and the contrast between their individual timelines with their children in which they focus on the present and find the future difficult to contemplate, and their shared vision of a better future for their children and others like them. This culminates in a discussion of maternal (micro)activism, mutual aid and peer support.
I have published my first article based on this research, and am working on further publications. I have also deposited my thesis in the UCL Discovery repository.
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