Ellie Conway is delighted to be re-joining Urban Studies in the School of Political and Social Science from May 2014.  Ellie’s is a familiar face around Urban Studies, as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, a tutor and occasional lecturer, and most recently as a researcher working on GoWell and ActWell.   She has spent the last year working in General Practice and Primary Care as a health researcher, exploring how the concept of ‘candidacy’ might help us understand why people may or may not take part in the national bowel cancer screening programme.

Her doctoral thesis (2013) examined the way in which political definitions of domestic abuse shape individual women's experiences of help seeking in Glasgow, in particular those women with insecure immigration status.  It demonstrated the way in which public representations of domestic abuse are politically constructed and how women’s ability to exit abusive relationships can be enabled or impeded by policy definitions themselves.  Her new post is a return to this field, working on a CSO funded project with Dr Mhairi Mackenzie which tests the feasibility and acceptability of a domestic abuse notification pilot, introduced by the then Strathclyde Police in 2012, which aims to improve levels of disclosure of abuse in primary care settings by notifying General Practitioners when their patients are victims in high risk incidents.

She has a growing list of publications from her thesis and from subsequent academic posts, and has also produced a Scottish Government report on the experiences of adult survivors of childhood institutional abuse.  A qualitative researcher, Ellie’s academic interests include the broader violence against women agenda; class, income and health inequalities; women and migration; policymaking and gender; access to and utilisation of public services; and feminist research methodologies and theory.  She has worked on a voluntary basis with a number of third sector organisations, including Poverty Alliance, the Scottish Domestic Abuse Helpline, and Positive Action in Housing, is a member of the Violence Against Women Prevention Network Scotland, and maintains links with a number of grassroots and community support groups in Glasgow.  She is looking forward to starting her new post, and to re-engaging with old friends, new colleagues and research networks in the School.

First published: 14 April 2014

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