Mia Harrison and Evidence-Making Interventions in Health
The current pandemic context has drawn particular attention to how the “evidence” of evidence-based medicine has moved beyond clinical practice; it is called upon by health professions, politicians and policy makers, media personalities, and publics to inform everything from large-scale policy implementation to mundane everyday practices. Sitting behind this wielding of evidence is an assumption that evidence can exist as a stable and fixed object that is separate from its implementation. The Evidence-Making Interventions (EMI) in Health program of research, led by Associate Professor Kari Lancaster and Professor Tim Rhodes, investigates the performative and transformative capacities of evidence in its so-called translation and implementation in health. An EMI approach invites a critical engagement with evidence as a matter of ontology and recognises evidence as being “in-the-making” in health and policy. In investigating evidence in this way, we explore how evidence comes into being in various contexts, including public media, health practice, and policy.
My work in this program of research has primarily focused on COVID-19, including how we come to know COVID-19, and the embodied experiences and practices of COVID-19 adaptation, recovery, and care. As part of this work, we are collaborating with the St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney ADAPT COVID-19 study, an interdisciplinary study aiming to characterise the long term effects of COVID-19 on patients post-infection. We are particularly interested in how patients and health care workers navigate treatment, recovery, and care in the face of uncertainty. We are generating qualitative accounts of recovery and care practices from patients and health care workers at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, thus contributing to knowledge of how to provide adaptive care in the face of uncertainty and in the midst of a rapidly evolving public health emergencies. This has included qualitative longitudinal research among adults experiencing what has come to be known through the patient-made term “Long Covid.” We apply an EMI approach to our investigation of patient experiences of Long Covid and health care workers’ practices of COVID-19 care, thus emphasising the relational materiality of COVID-19 embodiment and care practices.
Mia Harrison is a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH) at UNSW. She works as part of the Evidence-Making Interventions in Health program of research, led by Associate Professor Kari Lancaster and Professor Tim Rhodes. Mia has a background in transdisciplinary research in the field of critical medical humanities and brings mixed method approaches to investigate social, ethical, and philosophical concerns in health and medicine. In particular, Mia's work is informed by research approaches in feminist science and technology studies, medical ethics, cultural studies, and critical disability studies. She is also interested in the value of popular culture in research and pedagogy as a feeling- and affect-inflected mechanism for critical thinking. In addition to her work at the CSRH, Mia draws upon her background in media production and technology to produce public scholarship through the medium of podcasting.
