Myles Balfe

Hi, My name is Myles. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology in UCC. I teach on all aspects of the undergraduate and postgraduate programme in Sociology. My research and teaching covers three thematic areas. The first of these is using Sociological concepts to understand the experience of living with illness, particularly chronic illness. The second is understanding why health professionals and researchers sometimes engage in, and are incentivized to engage in, unethical behaviours. And the third is understanding how societal arrangements and health systems, and the contexts that those arrangements and systems are nested within (such as capitalism, democracy and autocracy), influence individual and population health. Underlying all of these strands is a fundamental interest in how social structures drive health. My work is based in Sociology; however I work closely with researchers and lecturers in the Health Sciences. If you are a student or a health professional who is interested in studying health, illness and medicine through Sociology, please feel free to contact me. I am particularly interested at the moment in privatization within the Irish health system; management of chronic illness; illness narratives, and representations of illness, in popular culture; and neurodiversity.

Violence; stigma; technology; chronic illness (especially type 1 diabetes); medical deviance; trust; risk; standardisation; bureaucracy; professionalisation; social networks.

Medical sociology; sociology of science; public health. I teach the following modules in UCC: SC1005 Medical Sociology for First Arts. SC1011 Medical Sociology for Public Health. (I am the module co-ordinator) SC1012 Medical Sociology for First Social Science. SC1015 Sociology for Nursing. (I am the module co-ordinator) SC1016 Sociology for Midwifery. (I am the module co-ordinator) SC3025 Health and Scientific Deviance. (I am the module co-ordinator) SC6643 Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine. (I am the module co-ordinator) I also supervise dissertations in the Sociology of Health at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.