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About me

I am a Lecturer in Human Geography working across feminist and cultural geography, health and the medical humanities. My research focuses on shame, gender, embodiment, affect and atmosphere, and particularly on how these are experienced through everyday life and relationships.

I am interested in experiences that are embodied, affective or difficult to put into words, and in developing creative and embodied ways of researching and teaching them. Much of my recent work has focused on shame and health including through collaborations with the Wellcome Trust-funded Shame and Medicine Project.

My research and teaching are connected by an interest in embodied and relational ways of knowing, and in how creative and participatory approaches can help us think differently about bodies, emotions, health and everyday experience.

 

Research

My research explores relationships between shame, gender, embodiment, affect and atmosphere. I am interested in what bodies feel and know, how past experiences shape present encounters, and how emotions and atmospheres affect our relationships with ourselves, other people and the spaces we inhabit.

 

Alongside this conceptual work, I develop creative and embodied methodologies for researching experiences that can be difficult to access or articulate through conventional qualitative methods.

 

I developed Moving Shame, a trauma-informed approach that combines movement practices, including yoga, somatics and dance movement psychotherapy, with arts-based methods such as body mapping, drawing and collage. I have used and adapted these workshops in a range of research, educational and community settings.

 

A significant strand of my current research examines shame in health and medical practice. Through the Shame and Medicine Project and collaborations with colleagues at Duke University School of Medicine, I have adapted Moving Shame for healthcare education, exploring how shame shapes clinical learning, professional identity and cultures of care.

My work sits across feminist and cultural geography, health geography and the medical humanities, with wider connections to health professions education.

 

Teaching and collaboration

I teach across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Human Geography, Liberal Arts and the Medical Humanities. My teaching draws on feminist, cultural and health geographies and uses creative and embodied approaches to encourage students to think critically about bodies, emotions, environments and different ways of knowing.

 

I created and co-convene Global Classrooms: Health Humanities and Geographies (HASM031), an international module developed with partners including Duke University School of Medicine, UNC Chapel Hill, the University of South Florida and UBC Okanagan. The module brings together students across disciplines and countries to explore embodiment, health and care through creative, dialogic, immersive and movement-based learning.

 

I also collaborate with Queer Circle London, where I design and facilitate research-informed workshops exploring shame, gender, sexuality, embodiment and wellbeing.

 

I am increasingly interested in how embodied and creative approaches can be developed and sustained across disciplines in higher education, both as ways of teaching and as ways of producing knowledge.

 

PhD supervision

 

Please contact me if you would like to discuss PhD supervision in an area related to my research.

I particularly welcome projects exploring shame and complex emotions; gender and embodiment; affect and atmospheres; feminist and cultural geographies; health and medical humanities; creative, participatory and embodied methodologies; or embodied and creative pedagogies.

 

Current

2026–present: Meg Searle, PhD Creative Arts in Education, Choreographing the Self: Embodied pedagogies and reflective practice in Somatic Community Movement Education.

 

Research interests

 

Shame, gender and everyday embodied experience

Affect, emotion and atmospheres

Feminist and cultural geographies of the body

Health geographies and medical humanities

Creative, embodied and arts-based methodologies

Trauma-informed and relational approaches to research and education

Embodied and creative pedagogies

Transdisciplinary education

 

Affiliations

 

Member, Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health

Collaborator, Shame and Medicine Project

Visiting Scholar, Duke University School of Medicine

Global Classrooms Teaching Fellow

 

Background

 

I hold a degree in English from King’s College London, a dual Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Gender Studies from the Universities of Oviedo and Hull, an MRes in Critical Human Geographies from the University of Exeter, and a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Exeter.

 

I am also a qualified trauma-informed yoga teacher, and my movement practice continues to inform my research and teaching.

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