Kathleen Galvin

Professor Kathleen Galvin is Professor of Nursing Practice. Her work has spanned phenomenology, philosophy, qualitative research, the arts and humanities in health, action research, multiple methods in service evaluation, public and patient involvement and perspectives, and issues in professional education.

As both a nurse and scholar Kathleen's theoretical work and current empirical research is grounded in a keen interest in philosophy and phenomenology. She aspires to contribute to fields concerned with how we can come to understand human experience in well-being and in vulnerability. Although this opens her to strong interdisciplinary influences, she is particularly interested in mining the breadth and depths of these explorations and research projects in order to bring back into nursing new insights for the meaning of care, relevant research methodologies, and epistemological frameworks that can enhance nursing practice, but also health and social care practice and education.

Her personal academic project concerns a contribution to philosophically informed theoretical insights and their import for the practice of caring. Her research work draws on humanities and the arts and she feels at home working in interdisciplinary contexts relevant to well-being, human experience and caring: In describing lived experiences and re-presenting them for the purposes of public and professional engagement empirically build upon a philosophically informed articulation of well-being and suffering. She aims to further develop ‘lifeworld led care’; further explore synergies and contributions to health related humanities and to practices in human services.

Kathleen wishes to continue to pursue all of these strands in order to further develop nursing theory, philosophy and research, with contributions to a distinctive development of person centred care: a framework for well-being, humanisation and suffering that can take account of a range of vulnerabilities in health and social care contexts.

Kathleen has published journal articles and book chapters that particularly focus on the values of services as experienced by people, new theoretical perspectives in caring and wellbeing, new methodology that draws on the arts - poetic inquiry and developments in qualitative research.

She is particularly interested in the application of methodologies which can help the public and professionals to engage in a more embodied way with qualitative research findings for the purposes deep insights with new understandings.

Her current research programme explores peoples’ experiences of a range of health issues, and using phenomenological-oriented philosophy develop novel theoretical framework for caring practices. This includes contributions to new theoretical perspectives on well-being, suffering and humanising approaches to human services. An important strand concerns the use of philosophy and the arts in developing insights that can lead practice. Outcomes include interdisciplinary projects and public engagement with science events and contributions to the ethics of care.

She is a graduate of the University of Ulster (BSc Nursing Studies and registered nurse) and while undertaking clinical nursing posts in older person care and acute vascular surgery completed a PhD in Nursing Studies at University of Manchester in 1997.

Before joining the University of Brighton, Kathleen held positions as Professor of Nursing Practice and Associate Dean Research, Enterprise and Scholarship at the University of Hull; Deputy Dean, Research and Enterprise, School of Health and Social Care, Bournemouth University, and Professor of Health Research and Head of Research at the Institute of Health and Community Studies, Bournemouth University following a post of Senior Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University.