Dr Helen Lambert

Summary

I am interested in the application of anthropological perspectives to a range of public health issues. These include:

HIV prevention and sexual health in vulnerable communities in South Asia, with a particular focus on sex work

Popular understandings of health, illness and therapy 

Non-biomedical therapeutic traditions in India within and outside the formal health sector

Lay understandings of suicide and suicide prevention in social and kinship networks

The role of ethnographic and other forms of qualitative research evidence in the formulation and evaluation of public health interventions

Teaching

Contributions to Society, Health and Medicine 1st year medical undergraduate course unit

Organiser, Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods short course

Keywords

• medical anthropology
• South Asia
• treatment-seeking
• evidence
• expertise
• kinship
• gender
• health inequalities
• social and cultural determinants of health
• medical pluralism

Skills

• HIV
• suicide
• NCDs
• familial hypercholesterolaemia

Methodologies

• ethnography
• qualitative research methods

Expertise

I am a social anthropologist who has lived and done research in India as well as the U.K. I am interested in social and cultural aspects of health, health care and healing. I have done research into how ordinary people think about health, illness and medicine and on their choices of therapy (of all types, not just biomedical).

Memberships

Organisations

School of Social and Community Medicine

Other sites

• Populationhealth

Recent publications

• Lambert, HS 2013, ‘Introduction: Plural forms of evidence in public health: tolerating epistemological and methodological diversity’. Evidence & Policy, vol 9., pp. 43-48
• Lambert, HS 2012, ‘Balancing community mobilisation and measurement needs in the evaluation of targeted interventions for HIV prevention’. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
• Lambert, HS 2012, ‘Wrestling with tradition: Towards a subaltern therapeutics of bonesetting and vessel treatment in north India’. in: David Hardiman, Projit Mukherji (eds) Medical marginality in South Asia: Situating subaltern therapeutics. Routledge, pp. 109-125
• Owen, G, Belam, J, Lambert, H, Donovan, J, Rapport, F & Owens, C 2012, ‘Suicide communication events: Lay interpretation of the communication of suicidal ideation and intent’. Social Science & Medicine, vol 75., pp. 419 - 428
• Lambert, H 2012, ‘Medical pluralism and medical marginality: Bone doctors and the selective legitimation of therapeutic expertise in India’. Social Science & Medicine, vol 74., pp. 1029 - 1036
• Owens, C & Lambert, H 2012, ‘Mad, Bad or Heroic? Gender, Identity and Accountability in Lay Portrayals of Suicide in LateTwentieth-Century England’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, vol 36., pp. 348 - 371
• Lambert, HS 2012, ‘‘New medical anthropology’, in Fardon R. et al. (eds.)’. in: The SAGE handbook of social anthropology . The SAGE handbook of social anthropology, pp. 353-364
• Owen, C, Owen, G, Belam, J, Lloyd, K, Rapport, F, Donovan, J & Lambert, H 2011, ‘Recognising and responding to suicidal crisis within family and social networks: qualitative study’. BMJ, vol 343., pp. 1 - 9
• Evans, C, Jana, S & Lambert, H 2010, ‘What makes a structural intervention? Reducing vulnerability to HIV in community settings, with particular reference to sex work’. Global Public Health, vol 5(5)., pp. 449 - 461
• Lambert, H 2010, ‘Commentary: Categorizing risks for HIV among female sex workers: the importance of context’. International Journal of Epidemiology, vol 39., pp. 448 - 449

View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system