Neil Armstrong is non-stipendiary Fellow and Tutor in Anthropology at Harris Manchester College.
Neil is a medical anthropologist working on mental health. His work focusses on improving how mental healthcare is organised, rather than developing and evaluating new interventions.
A feature of his research is that he coproduces ethnography, sharing authorship and working with people to write about their lives. A book containing coproduced ethnography and autoethnography, Everybody Knows: Collaborative Ethnographic Working in Mental Healthcare will be published by Routledge in 2023.
Neil is Student Mental Health Research Associate at King’s College London, where he is conducting a long-term ethnographic investigation of how to make the campus compassionate.
With colleagues at the University of the Arts London, he is involved in developing rituals that promote social connection and reduce loneliness through acts of public silliness.
Neil is co-editor (and co-author of four papers) for a forthcoming special edition of the journal History of Psychiatry: ‘The processes and context of innovation in mental healthcare: Oxfordshire as a case study’ to be published in 2023.
He is a Research Fellow at Re:Create Psychiatry, an organisation that works to facilitate productive dialogue between people who experience mental health problems, clinicians and researchers. https://recreatepsychiatry.com/
Neil is a member of the local NHS Clinical Ethics Advisory Group and is Associate Editor of the BJPsych Bulletin https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin
In Harris Manchester, Neil gives tutorials in anthropology for undergraduates taking the Archaeology and Anthropology degree. He is affiliated to the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and to the University Department of Psychiatry and is Stipendiary Lecturer and Director of Studies for the Archaeology and Anthropology degree at Magdalen College. He runs a lecture series on the anthropology of religion, contributes lectures in medical anthropology and convenes a graduate class in autoethnography and coproduced ethnography. He supervises doctoral students working in the anthropology of mental health.
