Des Fitzgerald

I am a sociologist of neuroscience, psychiatry and mental health. At KCL, I am Co-Investigator (with Nikolas Rose, PI, and Ilina Singh) on an ESRC-funded project about the links links between urban life, neurobiology, and mental illness. In this project, we're working to produce a comprehensive, transdisciplinary understanding account of the relations between urbanicity, psychiatric diagnosis and the brain, by joining sociological, neuroscientific, and psychiatric expertises, through a series of workshops, historical re-imaginings, and conceptual arguments. At the same time, we want to use the history - now somewhat faded - of sociological interest in this question, to re-think, and to re-vitalise, the links between the sociological and psychiatric sciences, and also to re-imagine the crossings between sociological and biological knowledges more generally.

I also have longstanding sociological interests in the neuroscience of autism (the topic of my Phd), and in the kinds of conceptual, practical and affective labour involved in understanding and conceptualsing a neurodevelopmental disorder. Throughout these interests, I am involved in a number of project on interdisciplinarity, where I am part of a group of scholars to understand, beyond the traditional encouragements, what is truly involved in occupying an intellectual and affective space across different disciplines.      

I am a sociologist of neuroscience, with active research interests in mental health, urbanicity, psychiatry, autism and emotion. At the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, I am Co-Investigator on an ESRC-funded project on the links between urban life, neurobiology, and mental illness. I also have a longstanding interest in interdisciplinarity - both in making the space for creative interdisciplinary work, but also in re-thinking the intellectual and institutional fabric of 'interdisciplinarity' as such. 

I received my PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2013. Before joining the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, and a Teaching Fellow at the London School of Economics.