Embodying the Social: the challenge of urban violence and inequalities in the era of the exposome

Understanding pathways across the life course to conceptualise how these shape the mental health of young women.

Novel biosocial approaches for understanding the pathways through which exposures across the life course (the ‘exposome’) shape mental health and wellbeing have potential for the identification of more effectively targeted policy interventions. This collaboration, focussed on the impact of violence on mental health of young women in urban environments, develops and extends such approaches, building on a Social Science Plus pilot study with Islington Council to align demographic, epidemiological and embodied experiential data on mental health in the Borough. Such biosocial research requires sustained transdisciplinary collaboration, methodological innovation and commitment to ongoing dialogue between social scientists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists. 

This project seeks to deepen transdisciplinary and public policy collaboration on mental health with departments at UCL (Anthropology, Psychiatry, Bartlett, IAS), Islington Council and local community groups. It will also expand  innovative methodological approaches with small pilot studies in comparative contexts outside the UK, including in Porto and São Paulo where project leads have ongoing collaborations, laying the foundations for wider multi-country collaboration funding bids. 

Addressing urban mental health requires a cross-disciplinary approach that can align methodological design, empirical data and conceptual tools in dialogue with public bodies and communities. Collaborations at UCL and with Islington Council and local communities have identified areas of shared interest and widened understanding of the relevant features of urban environments. This project will describe and conceptualise how these shape the mental health of young women from specific communities in Islington.

The team will develop methodological tools focused on ‘participative experiential mapping’. In dialogue with community groups, the project will expand participatory research interventions using additional methods to further deepen methodological insights of how, across time, the lived experience of place impacts mental health.