Liz Brosnan

Liz Brosnan completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Limerick, 2013 on the topic of mental health service-user involvement, examining the inherent tensions for service-users, service-providers and movement actors in involvement practices and policies. Her thesis included developing survivor standpoint epistemology, a recognition of the value and wisdom encapsulated in the voices of lived experience. A core member of the first user-led PAR research project in Ireland ‘Pathways’, Liz has been active in user-led research and in the national survivor/service-user movement in Ireland since 2000 following a decade and more using services herself. She has represented service-user perspectives on various local and national bodies and led for five years on building partnerships between service users and professionals in both the statutory and voluntary sectors. Her research interests include power and participatory praxis, especially with marginalised groups. She has also co-authored on critical legal theory of consent; gender, sexuality and mental health and critical pedagogy in social work education.  Liz worked as a post-doc researcher at the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, NUI Galway from 2015 on the EU-PERSON and ERC-VOICES projects. She then joined SURE in March 2017, to work on Professor Diana Rose’s Wellcome funded project, EURIKHA, looking at the history, status and impact of user/survivor-led research and knowledge production worldwide.