Rate My Professor Jesse Proudfoot

Dr. Jesse Proudfoot is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham University, where he joined in Autumn 2020. Prior to this appointment, he worked in Durham's Department of Geography and at DePaul University in Chicago. He currently serves as Lead of The DeepEnd, a Practice Discovery Research Platform in the Institute for Medical Humanities, and is a member of its academic management group. Proudfoot is also a member of the Sociology Department's Health and Social Theory research cluster and acts as Criminology Level 2 Year Tutor for Terms 2 and 3. He convenes the third-year modules Drugs & Society and Health & Place.

Proudfoot's research interests include drug use and addiction, structural violence and illness, ethnography, psychoanalysis, and mental health. His publications address these areas across disciplines such as geography, sociology, and medical humanities. Key works include Landscapes of Trauma and Mental Health in the Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing (2024); The Dreamwork of the Symptom: Reading Structural Racism and Family History in a Drug Addiction in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2023); The psychic life of gentrification: mapping desire and resentment in the gentrifying city in Cultural Geographies (2021, with D.K. Seitz); Isolation, solitude and social distancing for people who use drugs: An ethnographic perspective in Frontiers in Psychiatry (2021, with L. Roe et al.); Traumatic landscapes: Two geographies of addiction in Social Science and Medicine (2019); The Libidinal Economy of Revanchism: Illicit Drugs, Harm Reduction, and the Problem of Enjoyment in Progress in Human Geography (2019); Drugs, Addiction, and the Social Bond in Geography Compass (2017); Anxiety and Phantasy in the Field: The Position of the Unconscious in Ethnographic Research in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2015); Interviewing Enjoyment, or the Limits of Discourse in The Professional Geographer (2010); and At Street Level: Bureaucratic Practice in the Management of Urban Neighborhood Change in Urban Geography (2008, with E. McCann). These contributions examine the psychosocial and spatial dimensions of addiction, urban policy, and health inequities.