SHARE Profile: Gabrielle Samuel

What is your role in the SHARE project?

 I co-lead the SHARE project with Dr Federica Lucivero, and I’m responsible for the empirical strand of the UK aspect of the project, including through supervising early career researchers. I also lead WP1, which aims to assess the ethical, social and practical implications of using tools in situated and diverse contexts, and to explore how tools (mis)align with local values and epistemic cultures. This essentially involves the multi-country data collection and analysis.  Developing WP1 has been such an interesting and engaging journey as we co-develop our research materials for interviews and workshops, and I'm looking forward to the co-analysis and writing phase of the project with my wonderful collaborators.

What brought you to SHARE? 

My dual interest in environmental issues - and particularly the constant waste associated with consumptive societies (a long-time frustration of mine), and health research (I used to be a bioscience researcher in molecular genetics). I came to the field quite a few years ago now, when I noticed a gap in ethics discussions on the environmental sustainability of health research (at the time next to no one was talking about these issues). My initial work argued for the need to expand health research’s ethical gaze to consider concerns associated with the environment. As I continued along my research journey, I discovered how complicated this was to achieve in practice, as it unearths a range of questions associated with moral worth, responsibility, context, and justice.

What do you bring to the SHARE project?  

I bring the perspective of criticality – both from a sociological and ethics perspective. I have years of experience exploring the social and ethical issues associated with considering the environmental harms of research and have a clear understanding of the types of issues which need to be considered and addressed. There are a few concepts I would like to explore further through this project, including, for example, the idea of environmental citizenship, as well as questions around ideas of resistance in terms of ethics methods as well as in terms of environmental change. 

What excites you about this project? 

I'm really excited about engaging with our collaborators across our four study countries (Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya). And almost as much(!), I’m excited about exploring the meanings of environment as they are contextualised in different contexts and cultures, and then asking the question from the SHARE perspective: how do we bring these meanings into global health research in a way that is inclusive, just and fair?

The link to your preferred profile (institutional or other) 

Gabrielle Samuel