Profile
I’m a critical health geographer with interests in feminist and trans methodologies, urban studies and political economy. My pronouns are they/them.
My research interrogates the relationships between healthcare systems, social inequalities and state violence. How can we reconcile the benefits of organised healthcare with the harms it perpetrates, particularly against marginalised groups? Can these systems be redirected towards social justice, or do we need to imagine something else entirely?
To address these questions, my research investigates the structure and distribution of healthcare systems, their knowledge-making processes and their entanglement with wider political, social, economic and urban systems. Collaborations with people who have experienced marginalisation are central to my work.
I joined QMUL in 2024 to take up an Early Career Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2024–2027). My Leverhulme project explores the geographies of involuntary psychiatric detention (‘sectioning’) in London and Amsterdam. In 2024–25, I will hold a Visiting Fellowship in the Urban Geographies programme group at the University of Amsterdam.
Before coming to QMUL, I was a Temporary Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria at Amsterdam UMC, where I worked on a groundbreaking comparative study of trans-specific healthcare systems across the EU.
I completed my ESRC-funded PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge in 2023, with a thesis exploring the impacts of austerity on mental health service provision in England.
Research
Research Interests:
I am broadly interested in the relationships between healthcare systems, political economy, social inequalities and the politics of knowledge production. I investigate these topics using institutional ethnography, interviews and participatory methods, alongside statistical methodologies. My research has been published in Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Critical Social Policy.
At present I am pursuing four areas of research:
Mental healthcare and state violence
My Leverhulme project examines involuntary psychiatric detention (‘sectioning’) in London and Amsterdam. Detention rates are rising in both places, but the reasons for this are poorly understood. This disproportionately affects racialised people and those from deprived areas, who are most likely to be detained.
I am using participant observation to interrogate the decision-making practices of professionals, to understand how these might contribute to the reproduction of inequalities. I am also utilising participatory methods to explore the daily experiences of people who have been detained. The project has two broad aims: to theorise the relationship between mental healthcare, racialisation and urban securitisation; and to create a dialogue between feminist geographies of care and carceral geographies.
Geographies of trans healthcare and transphobia
Comparative research into trans healthcare is emerging as a field just as the hard-won progress of recent decades is threatened by a rise in transphobia. With colleagues at Amsterdam UMC, I conducted a groundbreaking study of trans-specific healthcare in the EU countries. I am building on this through a forthcoming project examining the geographies of transphobic attitudes in England. My research explores the relationship between political-economic formations and the parallel growth in trans identification and transphobia. I aim to theorise how trans identities are being institutionalised and the risks posed by this process.
Comparative geographies of austerity
My PhD research examined the impacts of austerity on mental health service provision in England. I carried out participant observation with bureaucrats responsible for alloating funding and with people attending services that were being cut. The project theorised the affective institutional geographies that support the enactment of austerity, and the new forms of conditionalisation which this instantiated in mental health services.
The majority of geographical research into austerity has focussed on the UK and Southern Europe. With colleagues at Groningen and Glasgow, I am currently working on a comparative study that extends theorisations of austerity to the Nordic countries.
Critical statistical methods
In recent decades, feminist critiques have reshaped qualitative methodologies. Questions of positionality and participatory approaches have become increasingly prominent. My research applies these critiques to statistical methods. I want to understand how statistics can be made more responsive to and representative of the communities they represent, and how new digital technologies might facilitate this.
Publications
Journal articles
Kiely, E. (2024) Between Coercion, Conditionality and Abandonment: A descriptive analysis of English mental health spending and provision under austerity. Journal of Critical Public Health 1(2): 51–73
https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jcph.v1i2.78931
Whittle, H., Kiely, E., Millard, I., Jadhav, S. & Killaspy, H. (2024) The relational institution: An ethnographic study of recovery orientation and therapeutic relationships on a psychiatric rehabilitation ward in London. BMC Psychiatry 24(1): 738
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-024-06140-0
Kiely, E., Millet, N., Barron, A., Kreukels, B. & Doyle, D.M. (2024) Unequal geographies of gender-affirming care: A comparative typology of trans-specific healthcare systems across Europe. Social Science & Medicine 356: 117145
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117145
Kiely, E. (2024) Entrepreneurship as Conditionality: New geographies of work(fare) in mental health services under austerity. Geoforum 150: 103996
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.103996
Kiely, E. & Strong, S. (2023) The Indexification of Poverty: The covert politics of small-area indices. Antipode 55(6): 1758–1780
https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12959
Kiely, E. & Warnock, R. (2023) The banality of state violence: Institutional neglect in austere local authorities. Critical Social Policy 43(2): 316–336
https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183221104976
Kiely, E. (2021) Stasis disguised as motion: Waiting, endurance and the camouflaging of austerity in mental health services. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46(3): 717–731
https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12431
Book reviews
Kiely, E. (2020) The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, Brett Christophers. Verso, London (2018). 384 pages,£ 20.00 hardcover. Journal of Historical Geography 67, 98–99
Reports
Kiely, E., Clarke, W. et al. (2022) Social Power & Mental Health: Conference Report. Cambridge: CRASSH. tinyurl.com/socialpowerreport
Media articles
Kiely, E. (2023) Unworkable. London Review of Books blog. lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/unworkable
Kiely, E. (2020) Policing Has No Place in Mental Health Support. Novara Media. novaramedia.com/2020/07/15/policing-has-no-place-in-mental-health-support/
Kiely, E. & Griffith, J. (2020) Overcrowded and Understaffed: Coronavirus Has Exposed the Flaws in Our Mental Health System. Novara Media. novaramedia.com/2020/04/28/overcrowded-and-understaffed-coronavirus-has-exposed-the-flaws-in-our-mental-health-system/
Kiely, E. (2015) I Lived in a London Hostel for a Week to See If It Could Be the Cure to My Rising Rent. VICE. vice.com/en_uk/article/wd7bvm/i-spent-a-week-in-a-london-hostel-282
Public Engagement
My writing has been featured in the London Review of Books, Vice and Novara Media, among other publications.
Between 2018 and 2021 I organised an interdisciplinary, participatory conference called Social Power and Mental Health in collaboration with a group of mental health survivors and activists from across Cambridgeshire. Our work was supported by organisations including the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, Lush, CRASSH, Encompass Network and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.
The conference aimed to challenge the exclusion of people with lived experience of mental distress from knowledge-making systems. Across a week of online sessions, we offered a radically open and non-hierarchical space for participants to share their experiences through talks, performances and short films. In total, more than 1000 people attended our sessions.
To find out more about Social Power and Mental Health, watch our talks or read our report.
