Josephine T. V. Greenbrook
Om Josephine T. V. Greenbrook
Background Josephine T. V. Greenbrook is an critical, interdisciplinary researcher; having originally founded roots in humanistic clinical psychology and transcultural psychiatry - before turning to medical sociology - and continuing on to medical law, medical ethics, global health bioethics, and migration medicine. Her doctoral research in medical law brought together the fields of migration medicine, the sociology of law, medical ethics, and anthropological theory of liminality and liminal space. Her work continues to be both inherently interdisciplinary, and her research and teaching cover a broad spectrum of the medical humanities and social sciences, and medical education.
Qualifications
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MSc Mental Health Psychology (University of Liverpool)
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LLM Medical Law and Ethics (University of Edinburgh)
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MS Sociology (University of Gothenburg)
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Master in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (University of Gothenburg)
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PhD in Law (Medical, Migration, Legal Anthropology) (University of Edinburgh)
Responsibilities & Affiliations Josephine currently serves as Research Group Lead in migration and health at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Institute of Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy, and is Chair for the international interdisciplinary research platform Borders in Health, Medicine, and Society. She is also Deputy Director of the Mason Institute for Medicine Life Sciences and the Law at Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh. Additionally, she serves as an external expert consultant in empirical research methods, as well as in research ethics and regulation, and is active in forwarding empirical findings in applied settings, engaging with the public, in medicine, policy, and the humanitarian sector. Other current research affiliations also include the Department of General Psychiatry at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Josephine is also the founder and chair of Thriving in Academia, an inclusive global community seeking to decolonise academia through the countering of epistemic injustice in academic spaces and supporting a thriving diversity of voices across disciplines.
Research Summary Areas of research include social medicine and border studies (with a primary focus on undocumented migration and unaccompanied migration), physician identity and pathway development, medical jurisprudence, structural injustice and human rights in medicine, culture in psychiatry, sexual and reproductive health rights, medical ethics and global health bioethics, clinical empathy, the decolonisation of research ethics and methodologies in health and medical research, and xenophobia, racism, and discrimination in medical education.
Physicians, physician identity, and physician experience have been a focal point throughout Josephine's work, exploring their lived experiences throughout their careers, in a variety of stages, contexts, and cases. Her research has advanced knowledge on how context and structure influence physicians' behaviour in everyday praxis, through the theoretical lenses of the lived experience of law and liminality in medical praxis, alienation and anomie in modern medicine, and professional (and personal) identity development among psychiatrists. Her research also explores broadened descriptions of health and illness in the context of undocumented migration and among unaccompanied minors; focusing on lived experiences, and intersections with healthcare institutions and healthcare professionals. Further, she is involved in multiple research projects covering global health, where she focuses on structural and systemic violence and its impact on health, sexual reproductive health rights, gender equality, mental health, and the decolonisation of research ethics and methodologies. Past research project have covered humanistic psychology and pluralistic psychotherapy, social movements in health, person-centered medicine, psychometrics, and the psychosocial weight of stillbirth.
Current Research Projects
Josephine is PI for The Boundaries Longitudinal Study, an interdisciplinary study funded by the Swedish Research Council and the University of Edinburgh, and conducted with Mayssa Rekhis, Lisen Dellenborg, Andrea Spehar, Lena Gross, Signe Askersjö, Zena Yared, Karin Åberg, Céline van Veen, and a team of junior researchers. The project explores physicians' responses to government initiatives to legislate the mandatory reporting of undocumented patients. The study takes a broadened ethnographic method, following emerging phenomena over a ten year period, through qualitative interviews conducted in various contexts within the healthcare system and medical education, participant observations conducted in medical humanitarianism and in civil society contexts engaged in the issue of mandatory reporting, and media analyses of ongoing discourses and debates at a societal level.
Josephine is PI for Sweden in the European Commission funded THCS consortium project CLARITY - Co-designing a Health Literacy Tool for Migrants to Empower Primary Care and Community Support Networks, which collaborates with France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium. The project will co-design, pilot, and evaluate a mental health literacy tool tailored to asylum seekers, their communities, and primary care professionals. Co-developed with asylum seekers, healthcare providers, and NGOs, the tool will support symptom recognition and provide culturally relevant guidance for access to care, while raising awareness among health and social care professionals and communities about asylum seeker-specific mental health needs.
Josephine co-leads VOICESforSRHR - Unaccompanied girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights: Identifying risks for human rights violations in healthcare contexts and mapping opportunities for support, together with Lisen Dellenborg, and My Opperdoes, Zena Yared, Lena Gross, and Mayssa Rekhis. This interdisciplinary study, funded by FORTE and VGR, investigates the lived experiences of forcibly displaced unaccompanied minor girls' sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as their transition into young adulthood, through the lens of intersectionality and gender-based violence. Further she is leading the methodology of a study together with Elisabeth Lönnermark, illuminating medical students' feelings of powerlessness in the face of racism in medical education and clinical placements.
Josephine is responsible researcher and co-investigator in the project SRHR support across languages: Structural conditions in healthcare for strengthening the health of people with experience of migration (SRHR-STÖD), led by My Opperdoes, in collaboration with the Knowledge Centre for Sexual Health, VGR, and RFSU, seeking to identify the structural conditions healthcare staff need to make SRHR information accessible across languages, and to study how multilingual material plus awareness of interpretation can reshape everyday practice into safer, more equitable encounters.
Current Doctoral Students
Principal supervisor for:
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My Opperdoes (Public Health) - Preliminary thesis title: Forcibly displaced unaccompanied minor girls and undocumented women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights: Girlhood, migration, young adulthood, and motherhood in Sweden.
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Zena Yared (Global Health) - Preliminary thesis title: TBD
Co-supervisor for:
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Rima Zaqout (Medical Anthropology) - Preliminary thesis title: Gazan Healthcare Infrastructure: Medical Resistance under Genocide