Josephine T. V. Greenbrook (MSc, LLM, PhD)

Research Fellow in Medical Law

Biography

Background

Dr. Greenbrook is an interdisciplinary researcher; having originally founded roots in humanistic clinical psychology and transcultural psychiatry - before turning to medical sociology - and continuing on to medical law and ethics, global health, and migration medicine. Her doctoral research in medical law brought together the fields of critical legal studies with migration medicine, the sociology of law, and anthropological theory of liminality and liminal space. Her work continues to be both inherently interdisciplinary, and her research and teaching explore the social sciences, medicine, and the law, navigating the margins of these fields, with a specific focus on highlighting humanity and the socio-cultural (in all its complexity) in medical contexts and medical education.

Qualifications

MSc Mental Health Psychology (University of Liverpool)

LLM Medical Law and Ethics (University of Edinburgh)

MSc Sociology (University of Gothenburg)

MEd Teaching in Higher Education (Dissertation pending - University of Gothenburg)

PhD in Law (University of Edinburgh)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Research Fellow in Medical Law and Deputy Director of the Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law at Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh.

Researcher (tenured) and Chair of the Platform for Migration, Health, and Human Rights at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine Institute of Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy University of Gothenburg.

Dr. Greenbrook is also appointed as a scientific advisor on the Swedish government's Ethical Review Authority. She also serves as an external expert consultant in Health Technology Assessments, as well as senior advisor in empirical methods and research ethics and regulation on multiple international research projects. Further, she is active in forwarding empirical findings in applied settings, engaging with the public both in medicine, health care, and the humanitarian sector.

She is also the founder and chair of Thriving in Academia: Advancing Minorities Across Academic Spaces.

Other current research affiliations also include the Department of General Psychiatry at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Postgraduate teaching

Global Health Law and Policy - Course Organiser

Dissertation supervision and examiner in the LLM Medical Law and Ethics programme.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Dr. Greenbrook is open to supervising projects at the intersection between law, medicine, and migration. Particular interest will be given to empirical projects involving lived experiences of physicians in relation to these areas, as well as undocumented migration, psychiatry, and proposals including decolonial methodologies. Other adjacent areas also of interest.

Current PhD students supervised

My Opperdoes - Unaccompanied minor refugee girls: Sexual and reproductive health and rights in adolescence and early adulthood

Linnea Schmitz - Palliative care in the event of severe mental illness

Research summary

Areas of research include migration medicine (primarily undocumented migration), physicians' pathway development, dual loyalties in commodified medicine, medical jurisprudence, human rights in medicine, transcultural psychiatry, medical ethics and bioethics, clinical empathy, sexual and reproductive health rights, medical sociology, transcultural encounters in healthcare and higher education, global health emergencies, and the decolonisation of research ethics and methods in health research.

Current research interests

Dr. Greenbrook currently researches physicians, throughout their careers, in a variety of stages and contexts. She is interested in how context and structure influence their behaviour in everyday praxis, focusing on the lived experience of law and liminality in medical praxis, alienation and anomie in modern medicine, and professional (and personal) identity development among psychiatrists. Her research also explores broadened descriptions of health and illness in the context of undocumented migration and among unaccompanied minors; focusing on lived experiences of structural hindrances, and intersections with healthcare institutions and healthcare professionals. Further, she is involved in multiple research projects covering global health, where she focuses on structural and systemic violence and its impact on health, sexual reproductive health rights, gender equality, mental health, and the decolonisation of research ethics and methods.

Past research interests

Past research project have covered humanistic psychology and pluralistic psychotherapy, social movements in health, person-centered medicine, psychometrics, and the psychosocial impacts of stillbirth. She has also explored and published on biopsychosocial elements of health and illness in various contexts.

Affiliated research centres

Project activity

Dr. Greenbrook is currently the project lead on The Boundaries Longitudinal Study. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, the project explores physicians lived experiences of dual loyalties and current legislative efforts to instill mandatory reporting of undocumented patients in public healthcare in Sweden. 

This interdisciplinary project aims to untangle the complexities involved in using medicine as a conduit for migration policy, when regulating physicians’ obligations to report undocumented migrants seeking care. The project aims to advance the state of the art in three ways. First, by investigating physicians’ discourses in the public sphere through a critical framing analysis, a contemporary example of the unfolding of restrictive migration policy debates as they entre healthcare contexts will be captured, offering a composite mapping of reasoning and reactions presented, and illuminating various facets of how migration policies transcend societal institutions in the lived experience of physicians. Second, by ethnographically exploring social and civil actions, understandings on the formation of protest and civil disobedience in questions relating to undocumented migration and healthcare rights will be illuminated, advancing knowledge on social movements in health and migration and the challenging of medical status and authority in society. Finally, dissecting and analysing physicians’ perceptions and experiences in everyday work will provide more nuanced understandings of the factors underpinning a diversity of responses to migration policy in medicine, advancing knowledge on the roles of hierarchy, healthcare organisations, and the everyday burdens of medicine, which ultimately determine undocumented migrants’ inclusion into or exclusion from the public healthcare system.

Current project grants

Swedish Research Council Project Grant (project grant - principal investigator/project lead)
FORTE: Swedish Research Council for Health, Work Life and Welfare (project grant - participating researcher responsible for methodology)

This article was published on