Inequality

We’re exploring people’s lived experience of mental healthcare and wellbeing, and how contemporary culture views and impacts mental illness through numerous interdisciplinary and cross-partnership projects.

• Our Mental Health Humanities network brings together academics across the University seeking nuanced and urgent understanding of health and illness.
• Professor Ruth Page's ESRC-funded research project investigates the impact of social media influencers on young people’s mental health.
• Dr Christina Wilkins is researching how male mental health is portrayed in fictional media.
• Professor Lisa Bortolotti is a key collaborator on the Agency in Youth Mental Health project, improving mental health services for young people.
• Dr Ema Sullivan-Bissett’s AHRC-funded project, Deluded by Experience, in partnership with brain injury charity Headway Birmingham and Solihull, challenges the assumption that delusional beliefs should be considered clinically abnormal in patients.

We’re working to ensure everyone can exercise their human right to access good quality healthcare, with a particular emphasis on reproductive rights and patient safety. We’re also uncovering the history of medicine and its role in popular culture.

• Professor Fiona de Londras and Professor Máiréad Enright helped create practical policy proposals and model legislation ahead of the referendum that finally gave women the right to lawful abortion in Ireland. They are now working on similar reforms around the world.
• Dr Lucía Berro Pizzarossa leads an international research project to understand the legal implications of self-managed abortion.
• Professor Atina Krajewska’s leads a major AHRC-funded project in Brazil focused on enhancing access to sexual and reproductive healthcare for indigenous women in accordance with their cultural practices.
• John Tingle’s work aims to develop a patient-centric safety system and just culture in health care systems in the NHS and around the world.
• Dr Emilie Taylor-Pirie’s recent open-access book, Empire Under the Microscope, explores the culture history of parasitology and its reflection its relationships with Britain’s literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935.

We’re ensuring everyone has access to culture and heritage as a crucial component of wellbeing, representation, and inclusivity, whether it’s opening up Shakespeare’s canon to the D/deaf community or supporting underrepresented groups in the music industry. We’re also making sure marginalised groups – like migrants and the homeless – and their histories are heard and social barriers to their inclusion removed.

• Professor Nick Crowson’s research into the hidden histories of homelessness in late-Victorian Britain has supported efforts to repeal the Vagrancy Act.
• Professor Sara Jones’s research into Eastern European migrants in the UK involves working with Citizenship UK to provide fair, affordable and timely routes to citizenship for all those who have settled in the UK.
• Dr Merten Reglitz is passionate about creating a human right to free and quality internet access.
• Professor Rosie Harding is working on making legal information and services more accessible to people with learning disabilities.
• Professor Adam Schembri is dedicated to the study and preservation of sign languages of deaf communities, including the first-ever large-scale investigation of the grammatical system of British Sign Language.
• Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall’s Signing Shakespeare project is helping D/deaf young people in schools and organisations across the country to access the playwright’s greatest works.
• Professor Annie Mahtani leads the Sounding Change programme to support more under-represented groups on a 10-month artist residency with the Department of Music.
• Professor Ruth Gilligan’s Birmingham Stories project in partnership with the National Literacy Trust works with local schools, businesses and community organisations on engaging activities to spread awareness of the importance of storytelling and literacy at every stage of life.
• Dr Maria Witek is using brain-monitoring equipment to understand embodied timing and disability in DJ practice.
• Professor Sabine Lee’s research and network for Children Born of War is looking to help these children and their mothers reintegrate into post-conflict societies.

Undergraduate

• BA Philosophy and Sociology

Postgraduate

• MSc Philosophy, Mental Health and Psychology
• LLM Law and Social Justice