Rate My Professor Caragh Brosnan

Associate Professor Caragh Brosnan is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle. She earned her PhD in the sociology of medical education from the University of Cambridge in 2008, along with Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degrees from the University of Queensland. Before joining the University of Newcastle in 2012, she held research and teaching positions at Keele University, King's College London, and Brunel University. Her research explores the interplay between knowledge, power, and health, situated at the intersection of the sociology of health and illness, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies. Core interests encompass the social aspects of knowledge production, legitimation, and use in scientific and health professional contexts, including professional identity formation, debates over evidence, ethical challenges, and professionalisation in medicine, medical education, midwifery, nursing, neuroscience, and complementary and alternative medicine. She contributes to applying social theory in health professions research and training to address health care inequities.

As an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) Fellow from 2014 to 2017, Brosnan directed the first cross-national qualitative study on the university inclusion of complementary medicine professions in Australia and the UK, yielding insights into professional knowledge and higher education dynamics. She has led projects like analyzing knowledge use by complementary medicine practitioners, introducing the 'salutogenic gaze' concept, and collaborated internationally— with Tampere and Umeå Universities on complementary medicine reconceptualization, and with the University of Newcastle, University of Toronto, and King's College London on first-in-family medical students' experiences, replicated across Australia, the UK, and Canada, with a 2024 follow-up on their decade-long trajectories. Key publications include the edited books Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Knowledge Production and Social Transformation (2018), Bourdieusian Prospects (2017), and Handbook of the Sociology of Medical Education (2009). Recent journal articles feature 'Then we forget to sit on our hands': how epistemic injustice impedes midwives’ and students’ capacities to humanize birth (2026), The salutogenic gaze: Theorising the practitioner role in complementary and alternative medicine consultations (2023), Promising the earth: Forms of capital promised and pursued in Australian-Chinese research collaborations (2025), and Chinese Medicine as Boundary Object(s): Examining TCM's Integration into International Science (2024).