Dialogue
How ideas leave the page and enter the world
Research is only one stage in the life of an idea. Dialogue is where those ideas are tested, translated, challenged, and shared through conversation with different communities — patients, clinicians, students, policymakers, readers, and fellow scholars.
Public Conversations
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25 March 2026
Health in Our Hands: Bridging Lived Experiences of Health from Patient, Community, Biomedical and Artistic Perspectives
I led on the original concept and theme for this one-day conference at Birkbeck Central, and on overall planning, as part of a four-person organising team working through Birkbeck's ECR co-production of health network and funded by the Institutional Fund for Research Cultures (Wellcome Trust). Together we issued the call for participation, reviewed incoming submissions and decided what was accepted, sorted accepted papers into thematic panels, and invited the plenary speakers. On the logistics side, we planned the day end to end — catering, room bookings, and the emergency exit plan among them — working with Matthew Barrington, who liaised on our behalf with Birkbeck's departments, building managers, and caterers. I opened the day with the welcome address. The conference itself brought early career researchers from biomedical, arts, humanities, and social science backgrounds together to present on lived experience as a form of knowledge about health, closing with a keynote from Dr Siobhan O'Connor (King's College London).
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2025
Narrating infertility: A sociolinguistic exploration of Muslim women's lived experiences
Postgraduate Seminar Series, Birkbeck, University of London — including reflections on a Wellcome Trust grant application.
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[Forthcoming]
[Festival event, panel, or community conversation]
[Space reserved — e.g. Being Human Festival.]
Media
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2019
ArabicOn choosing discourse analysis, and what has to be brought home
Recorded in 2019 during my doctoral fieldwork, for UK Bilarabi's social media channels — an Arabic-language programme spotlighting the stories of Gulf scholarship students pursuing Master's and doctoral study in Britain. It discusses why I chose discourse analysis after an undergraduate background in literature, and what the field can practically offer — from helping doctors communicate more clearly with patients to helping organisations understand friction in their own meetings. It also traces the influence behind that choice: my father's own path from helping run his father's sweet shop as a mocked schoolboy to earning a UK master's degree and becoming a university lecturer, and the family habit of debate that grew out of watching him do it. It closes on a belief I still hold — that distinction comes from small, continuous effort rather than one grand achievement, and that whatever is learned abroad has to be carried home and put to use.
Workshops
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2004 — 2018
Academic-writing workshops, University of Bahrain Writing Centre
Designed and delivered structured academic-writing guidance for Master's and PhD students across disciplines.
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[Forthcoming]
[NHS or healthcare communication workshop]
[Space reserved, developing from Programme 01 practice implications.]
Collaboration
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Ongoing
Professor Lisa McEntee-Atalianis, Birkbeck, University of London
Collaborative research in sociolinguistics, health communication, and medical humanities, including co-authored publications and narrative negotiations of medical authority.
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In preparation
C. Tagg et al. (Eds.), Digital Intimacies
Contributing chapter on family digital intimacy, Bloomsbury (Section 2: Family & Everyday Intimacies).
Implementation
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2026
For cliniciansMetaphor-Aware Communication in Fertility Care
A practitioner companion to the Qualitative Health Research paper, for fertility clinicians, counsellors, psychologists, and specialist nurses. It distils the five metaphor families patients use to talk about their bodies — machine, battleground, container, rebellious agent, journey — into a short guide on what each one is actually communicating and how to respond, plus guidance on faith-literate, lineage-sensitive conversation where bioethical questions arise.
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2025
For care & communitySupporting Patients Across Online and Offline Stigma
A practitioner companion to the Narrative Inquiry paper, for healthcare professionals, counsellors, educators, religious and community institutions, and policy makers. It sets out why online peer communities can gate-keep as well as support — particularly once a member becomes pregnant — and how to recognise the ‘deserving vs undeserving’ pregnancy narrative some patients carry, so that support accounts for online as well as offline stigma.
Reflections
Who a Method Can Reach
A conversation with a GP and fellow researcher — someone who had also lived through infertility herself — sent me back to a question I thought I’d already settled: how do you find the women a piece of research like this actually needs to hear?
The official route runs through the NHS: ethical approval, a search through practice records, a list of names, a phone call. It sounds neutral. It isn’t. Recruitment through a clinical gatekeeper reaches only the women already inside the system — past the referral, within the eligibility criteria, willing to discuss a private grief with a stranger who rings unannounced. It quietly excludes the woman who has waited eighteen months for a first appointment, the woman whose BMI sits just over the threshold used to decide who qualifies for treatment, the woman for whom a cold call from a research office is simply not a context in which this particular story gets told. None of that is anyone’s fault. It is just what a method built around institutional access is built to find.
The alternative she described — reaching women through community and faith networks, one recruit recommending another — sounded at first like a compromise: less standardised, harder to write into a protocol. I’ve come to think it’s closer to the opposite. A woman who hears about a study from someone she already trusts, in a setting where infertility is already an open subject rather than a diagnosis to disclose to a stranger, isn’t a lower-quality participant. She may simply be a truer one — closer to the range of experience the research exists to represent, including the experience that never reaches a GP’s waiting room at all.
I still need the NHS route for some of what this work requires. But the conversation left me with a question I now ask of every recruitment plan before I ask anything else: who does this method make it easy to reach, and who has it quietly decided not to look for?