Professor Felicity Thomas

Felicity is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Community Sciences, and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Exeter. Her work focuses on understanding and addressing health and social care inequalities. She is especially interested in understanding how cultures - encompassing societal values and norms, working practice, and regulatory and research cultures – intersect to impact on health and social care delivery, particularly for marginalised population groups. She has a particular interest in the intersections between poverty, mental health, and medicalisation, and in improving social care practice to support families with complex needs. She works in collaboration with service users, patients and health and social care providers to understand the cultural contexts that shape their experiences, and to design and lead impactful studies that shift working practice to create more ethical and sustainable health and social care.

Felicity is an applied social scientist with an interdisciplinary background. She draws mainly on narrative, ethnographic and engaged research methods.