Dr Hannah Cowan

Hannah Cowan is a medical anthropologist funded by the Biomedical Research Centre to understand the impact of health research on society. She is interested in activism, social inequalities, and health and is passionate about bringing non-academic communities and researchers together to help shape research agendas and find everyday ways of resisting the reproduction of inequalities. She is currently working on a project entitled: Utopia Now! Imagining a better worlds with researchers and young people. This is an exploratory project using creative methods to compare how the future of medicine and healthcare is being imagined within university and research communities, with the futures the hopes and fears of young people in Lambeth and Southwark. Hannah has also completed a PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on the politics of the NHS. In this research, she critiques current debates on the privatisation of healthcare and suggests the hierarchical relations and knowledge practices ingrained in the NHS have always produced inequalities.