Amy Barnes
Senior Research Fellow
Profile
Biography
Amy has over 15 years of experience of community- and policy- engaged scholarship focused on building skills and capacities to evidence and take collective action to address determinants of health and inequality. Her expertise covers a range of internationally-relevant public health topics, including the commercial determinants of health, issues of power and control, food, housing, and creating healthy livelihoods and a healthier economy.
She is also passionate about supporting learning about how to redress issues of inclusion, participation and partnership in public health policy and health systems, and has worked on collaborative research on these topics with teams in the UK, South Asia (Pakistan, Nepal) and Africa (Zambia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa).
Amy’s recent work has included participatory research and evaluation with government and civil society groups in the UK and internationally. This has involved the use of a range of methods (e.g. policy mapping, Most Significant Change, journey and ripple effect mapping, zine-making), co-designing approaches to engage citizens in policy debate (e.g. participatory video, grime artist and lyric development with young people, digital ‘live scribing’ of discussions, co-producing audio-visuals (e.g. https://youtu.be/czGodccTP10) for policy), and producing ‘real-time’ knowledge to improve the implementation of public health programmes.
Qualifications
- BSc (Hons)
- MA (Econ)
- PhD
- FHEA
Research
Overview
Amy has interdisciplinary public health experience, with particular expertise in the following areas:
- Inclusion, participation and partnership in public health policy and public health
systems - Collective action to address wider determinants of health, including commercial
determinants. power and control, healthy livelihoods and a healthy economy, food
and housing - Participatory research and evaluation
- Policy-engaged research
- Complex systems evaluation (social-political processes)
Projects
- ActEarly – Healthy Livelihoods theme (working to stop children growing up in poverty)
- Scaling up 24/7 maternity care in Basic Health Units in Pakistan
- Healthier economies internationally: Co-operatives and public health
- Healthy Urban Places - UKRI Population Health Improvement UK initiative
