"Our work is about trying to create democratic learning spaces": An Interview with Angie Hart, Community University Partnership Programme, University of Brighton

Angie Hart is the academic director of the award-winning Community University Partnership Programme at the University of Brighton. She is also professor of child, family and community health in the School of Nursing and Midwifery in the Faculty of Health and Social Science. She teaches professional courses for health and social care practitioners and undertakes participatory research into inequalities in health and social care in relation to children and families. She currently has a number of resilience-focused research projects under way.

Professor Hart is a child and family therapist, and until August 2008 she worked part-time as a research-practitioner in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), Sussex Partnership NHS Trust, Brighton. She worked both in a specialist team supporting fostered and adopted children and in a CAMHS clinic located in a socially and economically deprived area of Brighton. As the adoptive parent of three children from the care system, she has much experience herself as a user of both statutory and voluntary health and social care services.

Hart has published widely on health and social care services to disadvantaged children, their families, and their supporters, especially in relation to fostering and adoption, midwifery and health visiting, and the concept of resilience. She has also published her work on the development of community-university partnership programs. Her current work includes developing a series of communities of practice, in collaboration with a local charity. This project involves working with groups of parents and practitioners to implement and develop Resilient Therapy.

Hart's degrees are in philosophy and social anthropology from the Universities of Sussex, Cambridge, and Oxford, and she has a postgraduate diploma in psychotherapeutic counseling from the University of Sussex. She has worked as a research collaborator and project manager on many multi-disciplinary research projects, some commissioned by major United Kingdom government agencies, such as the Department of Health and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

More information about Angie Hart and her work can be found at http://www.brighton.ac.uk/cupp/contact-cupp/cupp-team/72-angie-hart.html and at http://www.boingboing.org.uk/. See http://www.theasa.org/networks/apply.shtml for more about applied anthropology in Britain.

She is interviewed here by Graham Crow, deputy director of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and professor of sociology at the University of Southampton.

Crow:

To what extent did the applied aspect of anthropology influence your decision to become an anthropologist?

Hart:

When I started off doing my anthropology postgraduate training, my first degree was in philosophy and European Studies at Sussex University, and one of the things I was interested in was cultural difference. I didn't really get much opportunity to explore it in that degree, but I loved learning different languages—I'd lived in different countries, so that aspect of anthropology appealed to me to study at masters level. So I applied to do an MPhil at Cambridge in the social anthropology department. The applied anthropology in Britain at that time, the late 1980s—there wasn't any applied aspect in anthropology postgraduate training that I knew of; it was very much conventional academic research. But during the course of that year and the subsequent three years doing a PhD in social anthropology at Oxford I was part of a group of people who were involved in the early days of what we called Anthropology in Action, what is now Apply, the applied anthropology organization. So it came the other way round. There were very few people I knew who were applying anthropology. They were working in NGOs. Tom Selwyn was doing research on tourism that had an applied aspect to it, but really it was a very minor discourse, a counterdiscourse to what was going on in mainstream anthropology in some contexts, for sure. Funny, because now I see that Apply has become part of the mainstream Association of Social Anthropologists. You couldn't have imagined that back...