In this episode of Thinking In Between, we welcome four experienced ethnographers working in health and social care research: Professor Catherine Pope (University of Oxford), Professor Nicola Mackintosh (University of Leicester), Dr Shadreck Mwale (University of West London), and Dr Fawn Harrad-Hyde (University of Leicester), to discuss:

- The particular value of ethnography as a research approach

- Issues encountered when ethnographic research plans are reviewed during research governance processes

- Learning from the "Ethics and Ethnography" symposium, held at the University of Oxford in March 2025

- What can ethnographers do now when navigating research governance?

- Where is change possible moving forward?

This episode of Thinking In Between hears from Dr Sara Paparini, a medical anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Equity at the Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London. Sara's research began in HIV but has expanded to applying critical public health and anti-racist lenses to many other areas. Sara shares three big ideas with us in this episode:

1. Knowledge is Power - "Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism" by Catherine Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Differences in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" by Rana Hogarth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 156-157
2. Ian Hacking on "Making People Up". The particular lecture that Sara discusses is Kinds of People: Moving Targets, which he presented at the British Academy in 2007. Another key text is "The Taming of Chance" by Ian Hacking (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
3. Racialisation - a particular malevonent form of "making people up", which Sara uses Hacking's work to understand. Sara shares from "Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation" by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Verso, 2022)

Our guest today is Dr Sam Miles, Reader in Social Science at Barts and the London Medical School, Queen Mary University of London. He leads social science teaching across the medical school. Today, he talks about what it's like to work in that role, and shares three ideas who have most influenced his work and thinking:

1) Helen Bamber: a remarkable leader and human rights advocate 2) Legacies: particularly through Sam's work on the children's author David Rees, who died from HIV/AIDS 3) Learning "From the Horse's Mouth" - who do you choose to teach and to learn from?