
Biography
Dr Stan Papoulias is Research Fellow and Deputy Theme Lead for Patient and Public Involvement Research at the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) South London. Stan is a long term user of mental health services, who trained and held lecturer posts in cultural studies, media and communications in a number of universities, before coming to SURE in 2012. Their earlier work on cross disciplinary conceptualisations of memory and trauma continues to inform their work at SURE and led to the development of participatory embodied methodologies to explore how people navigate healthcare environments. Stan's more recent work focuses on investigating how patient and public involvement is embedded in research environments, with particular emphasis on the emergence of a ‘PPI workforce’ and on what it means to undertake care and relational labour within a ‘neoliberal’ context. Overall, Stan is keenly interested in how different methodologies may inform our understanding of ‘experience’ and more generally on what it means to attend to ‘experience’ as a form of knowledge.
Research Interests
- Patient and public involvement in research
- Precarity and labour relations in research ecologies
- Design and built environment of healthcare provision
- Survivor research
- PhotoVoice
Teaching
- Qualitative research methods
- User-led research
- Visual and participatory methods
Research

Service User Research Enterprise
The Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) undertakes research that examines mental health services from the perspectives of those that use them, explores empirically and conceptually the impact of service user involvement in research (in terms of both process and outcomes), and critically interrogates how service users have changed knowledge production globally.
Research

Service User Research Enterprise
The Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) undertakes research that examines mental health services from the perspectives of those that use them, explores empirically and conceptually the impact of service user involvement in research (in terms of both process and outcomes), and critically interrogates how service users have changed knowledge production globally.