Dr Eleni Theodoropoulou PhD

Personal Statement

I am a sociologist of health and illness with an interest in drug and alcohol use and recovery, mental health and empirical creative methods, and a commitment to interdisciplinary working. My latest project (in collaboration with Dr Nicole Vitellone and the artist and filmmaker Melanie Manchot), draws on the Deleuzian concepts of minor practice and fabulation and focuses on how participatory filmmaking can advance knowledges and practices of recovery from drugs and alcohol. Prior to this research, I conducted an empirical study exploring the practices of care emerging in two drug recovery services in Liverpool and Athens. Employing Deleuzo–Guattarian orientations to assemblage and feminist approaches to care, I offered a critique of neoliberal approaches to recovery from drugs and alcohol, while collapsing the dualities of harm reduction and recovery (see Theodoropoulou (2023) Becoming with Care in Drug Treatment Services: the Recovery Assemblage).

I work as Lecturer in Public Health in the Department of Public Health, Policy and Systems. I am currently teaching on the Master of Public Health, where I lead the ‘Health and Society’, ‘Health Improvement’ and ‘Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods’ modules. I am member of the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment (CHASE), a cross-faculty, cross-disciplinary centre to promote humanities and social science thinking and practice. I completed my PhD at the University of Liverpool, in the department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology in 2020, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship supported by CHASE. I worked for a year as Lecturer in Drug and Alcohol Studies at the University of the West of Scotland, before coming back to Liverpool and my current role, in September 2022.

Research interests: Deleuzo-Guattarian methods; feminist epistemologies of care; recovery from drug and alcohol use and mental illness; empirical and creative research methods; syndemics and biosocialities.