Dr. Christine Milligan, Reader, Division of Health Research, School of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. Christine’s research interests are focused around: voluntarism and social welfare; informal care-giving and older people; mental health; and therapeutic landscapes. She also has an interest in ethics in research.
Christine Milligan was born in Dumfries, Scotland. She was a career employee in the service sector before entering academia as a mature student. She earned a joint honours degree (1st Class) in Politics and Geography at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where she also earned her PhD in 1999. She became interested in the geographies of voluntarism and care as a direct result of her family experiences of informal caring. This experience triggered a passion for attempting to unpack the complex relationships between people, place and care. Christine was a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Geography at Strathclyde before moving to the Institute for Health Research at Lancaster to take up a permanent Lectureship, also in 1999. She was promoted to Reader in 2007. She has over fifty publications including a single-authored book, Geographies of Care: Space, Place and the Voluntary Sector (Aldershot: Ashgate) and three co-edited books. She has published in a wide range journals including Health Place, Social Science Medicine, Progress in Human Geography, and Environment and Planning A, among others.
Christine has undertaken research funded by government, research councils and the European Union, and the Voluntary Sector. Her current research involves activism in the voluntary sector (with Robin Kearns and others), new technologies and responsibilities for health care of older people at home across diverse European cultures and systems (with Maggie Mort and others), and Grow Your Own – health risks and benefits of producting and consuming your own food in urban areas (with Jonathon Leake, Barbara Maher, Jan Rigby and Margo Barker). She is also running a three year ESRC Research Development Initiative on ethics and ethical practice in Social Science Research. Christine’s teaching interests have a particular emphasis on qualitative methods, health geography, theory and debate in health and medicine and ethics in research.
Christine may be contacted at c.milligan@lancaster.ac.uk.
Updated: March 2009
Health and Medical Geography 