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Detail of the cover of Compulsive Body Spaces
Dr Diana Beljaars

Dr Diana Beljaars

Research Officer
Health Data Science

Email address

Research Links

ResearchGate
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About

I’m a cultural, disability, and health geographer, working on the intersections of human geography, medical humanities, disability studies, continental philosophy, as well as the Tourette’s-related neuropsychiatric, biomedical, and clinical sciences. My scholarship also includes critical social science approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency and primary care health services research, particularly regarding health inequalities.

I largely employ qualitative social science and humanities methodologies, including various interview techniques as well as narrative and critical discourse analysis. I also use and develop in-situ methods to capture dimensions of peoples lives that don’t easily form into memory, including ethnography and structured observation, but also mobile eye-tracking technologies.

My work to date roughly divides into three broad, intersecting strands (see research section):
1. Extraordinary body-environment relations: compulsion
2. The medicalisation of behaviour
3. Knowledge formations in health services, governmental agencies in the context of health crises and inequality

Currently, I also assist in leading the PPIE dimension of PRIME Centre Wales: the SUPER group. This group offers feedback to research ideas and emerging research proposals by PRIME Centre Wales researchers.

NEWS:
I’m an Invited Speaker at the Critical Neurodiversity Studies conference in Durham 24 – 26 June 2025. The conference is free and will stream online. More information here

Areas Of Expertise

  • Compulsion & Tourette syndrome
  • Neurodiversity, Disability & Mental Health
  • Posthumanism
  • COVID19 pandemic responses in Wales
  • Health inequalities in the NHS
  • Interdisciplinarity, medical knowledge construction
  • Qualitative research & mobile eye-tracking

Career Highlights

Research
Book cover of my monograph 'Compulsive Body Spaces'

I am a cultural, health, and disability geographer and bring in the medical humanities, continental philosophy, and the Tourette's-related neurosciences, psychiatry, and psychology. 

My work to date roughly divides into three broad, intersecting strands:
1. Extraordinary body-environment relations: compulsion
My work focuses on the different rationalities at work in bodily action and the worlds that are shaped by them. In particular, I examine them through the concept of compulsivity, which is a pathologised form of action that people feel urged to do but cannot readily explain, mainly in the context of Tourette syndrome. I employ postphenomenological and posthumanist approaches to understandings of how the bodily environment co-constitutes compulsions, and work most closely with the works of Lingis, Manning, Grosz, Bennett, Deleuze, Guattari, Bergson, and Canguilhem.

2. The medicalisation of behaviour
I also work on the formal and informal knowledge formation processes that underpin medicalised behaviour. In particular, I focus on the intersections and contradictions between experiential lived forms of knowledge, neurodiversity approaches, and clinical models. I do so with critical approaches and historical perspectives, mostly in the context of disability and according to the neurodiversity paradigm.

3. Knowledge formations in health services, governmental agencies in the context of health crises and inequality
This third strand of work is rooted in my work on the COVINFORM project and my current work in emergency and primary care services for PRIME Centre Wales. As part of the EU-funded consortium, representing Wales, I co-analysed the institutional and community responses on their constructions and operationalisation of inequality following COVID-19 regulations. We focused on ethnic minority women, foreign-qualified nurses, and Gipsy-Traveller communities in Wales. As part of my health service research, I focus on ethnic disparities when accessing emergency care after injury on BE SURE, consider GP and patient perspectives on risk prediction models for emergency hospital admission on PRISMATIC2, and community models for the improvement of diabetes type 2 care for minority ethnic patients on CYMELL.

Award Highlights Collaborations
Swansea Science Festival 2022