Emma Garnett

University of Exeter | UoE · Department of Geography

Schools are increasingly positioned as sites for intervening on the bodies and minds of children in the here and now in order to bring about health gain for the future. Public health interventions for schools bring together coalitions of commercial, statutory and philanthropic actors with children and their teachers and carers. Drawing on ethnograp...

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of co...

Air pollution is often understood through a composition of different kinds of data that increasingly include personal exposure measurements. This chapter is based on our involvement in an interdisciplinary project in Delhi that is combining computational methods and embodied data to simultaneously map, know and respond to air pollution. We use the...

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of co...

Waste has become a pivotal public health and environmental problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this interdisciplinary review, we move beyond the ‘coronalitter’ and ‘coronawaste’ discourses, which have come to dominate public imaginaries of waste, to consider less-visible dimensions of waste infrastructures and systems. We demonstrate how waste...

Feminist technoscientific research with chemicals is proliferating. This critical commentary considers how this scholarship extends environmental justice research on pollution. We are concerned with two key questions: How can we do/design ethical research with chemicals? And, what methods allow for researching chemicals without resorting to an imag...

In this article, I materially situate air pollution exposure as a topic of social and political inquiry by paying attention to the increasing specificity of spaces and sites of exposure in air pollution and health research. Evidence of the unevenness of exposure and differential health effects of air pollution have led to a proliferation of studies...

For the past several decades, global health research and policy have raised the alarm about the growing threat of counterfeit and low-quality drugs (henceforth ‘fakes’). These high-profile and regularly-repeated claims about ‘fake drugs’ pepper scholarly publications, grey literature, and popular writing. We reviewed much of this work and found tha...

Introduction Reducing motorised transport is crucial for achieving public health goals, but cars will continue to be essential for many in the medium term. The role of emerging technologies in mitigating the public health disadvantages of this private car use has been under-examined to date. Telematics are increasingly used by novice drivers in the...

The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and gas concentrations to better understand how they perform in the light of air quality guidance and legislation, and to make predictions in terms of future environmental health targets. The visibility of these data is considered crucial for citizens to ma...

Societal impact is an increasingly important imperative of academic funding. However, there is little research to date documenting how impact is accomplished in practice. Drawing on insights from Actor-Network Theory, we explore the research-policy interface within an interdisciplinary research project on the relationships between air pollution and...

Health can be understood as a concept, a practice and a capacity, and is inherently complex, fluid and indeterminate. Ethnography, with its attention to how relations unfold between people, places, practices and things, is well suited to explore the situated meanings of health. The introductory chapter describes the scope and purpose of this collec...

This chapter draws on ethnographic research of interdisciplinary air pollution science. Interdisciplinarity characterises contemporary public health research and ethnographers are increasingly contributors to these epistemic milieus. There has been limited research to date on the role ethnographic knowledge can play in the production of science and...

This edited collection explores the multiple ways in which ethnography and health emerge and take form through the research process. There is now a plethora of disciplinary engagements with ethnography around the topic of health, including anthropology, sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and in health care professions such as nur...

Objectives: To explore the contribution of social enterprises to publicly commissioned public health improvement and assess the risks and benefits of their role. Study design: Qualitative case study of four south London boroughs. Methods: Documentary research; in-depth interviews with 19 key informants. Results: This study identified 24 soci...

In the light of the ‘peak-car’ thesis, this paper explores the driving-related desires and practices of adults aged 16–21 and their parents from the UK. Tropes of freedom and independence were commonly evoked; but were pragmatically framed by concerns of finance, utility and risk. Car ownership was prized only for instrumental reasons, and as one t...

The coordination of public services is an enduring challenge and an important policy priority. One way to achieve collaboration across organizational boundaries, which is being considered in public services such as the English National Health Service (NHS), is through the adoption of alliance contracting, prime provider contracting and outcome-base...

The coordination of public services is an enduring challenge and an important policy priority. One way to achieve collaboration across organizational boundaries, which is being considered in public services such as the English National Health Service (NHS), is through the adoption of alliance contracting, prime provider contracting and outcome-base...

This article traces an emergent tension in an interdisciplinary public health project called Weather Health and Air Pollution (WHAP). The tension centered on two different kinds of data of air pollution: monitored and modeled data. Starting out with monitoring and modeling practices, the different ways in which they enacted air pollution are detail...

This paper presents air pollution as a ‘post-human’ public health phenomenon. It draws on an ethnography of a multidisciplinary research project called Weather Health and Air Pollution to explore the material ways in which air pollution challenged scientists’ conceptualisations of harm and health. The epidemiologists on WHAP used statistical techni...

Objective: The Health and Social Care Act 2012 ('HSCA 2012') introduced a new, statutory, form of regulation of competition into the National Health Service (NHS), while at the same time recognising that cooperation was necessary. NHS England's policy document, The Five Year Forward View ('5YFV') of 2014 placed less emphasis on competition without...

This paper is based on ethnographic research of data practices in a public health project called Weather Health and Air Pollution. (All names are pseudonyms.) I examine two different kinds of practices that make air pollution data, focusing on how they relate to particular modes of sensing and articulating air pollution. I begin by describing the i...

In this thesis I examine scientific practices which produce data on air pollution, and the ways in which these data are managed and co-ordinated by researchers to make claims about air pollution. In doing so, I attend to the everyday practices and experiences of scientific research, exploring the ways in which science is a social and cultural endea...