Dr Neil Armstrong
Tutor
Dr Neil Armstrong is a social and medical anthropologist. Since 2012 he has given lectures in the anthropology and sociology of religion at Blackfriars, as well as providing tutorials in social and cultural anthropology and the anthropology of religion.
He is Lecturer in Anthropology, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, a Postdoctoral Associate of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, also at the University of Oxford, and he is Honorary Fellow, University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry.
Dr Armstrong’s research concerns mental health and mental healthcare. He investigates the frontiers between the anthropology of bureaucracy, institutions, ethics, and personal change. Recent and forthcoming publications include papers investigating how the institutional setting of mental healthcare becomes entangled with clinical work, the role of happenstance in institution-building, and the application of the notion of epistemic injustice in mental healthcare. Dr Armstrong has an interest in life-writing by people with first-hand experience of distress and the use of film to both represent and address anxiety and depression. He is currently writing a book about internal contradictions in contemporary mental healthcare.
Dr Armstrong is currently engaged in ethnographic work about addiction and recovery. He is co-investigator on SMaRteN, a national research network funded by UK Research and Innovation, led by King’s College, University of London, focusing on Student Mental Health in Higher Education.
He is Associate Editor, BJ Psychiatric Bulletin. As a member of Re:Create Psychiatry he seeks to create dialogue between clinicians, service-users and members of the public.