Dr Abi Macdonald

I qualified as a medical doctor in 2022. I worked for over ten years in healthcare, first as a carer, then as a Senior Clinical Research Practitioner at Barts Cancer Centre, and finally in medicine. During my medical education, I became increasingly interested in social and public health due to witnessing the patterns and scale of health inequities across the population. I went on to complete a master’s in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I focused my thesis on how people experiencing food insecurity and illness are represented in healthcare practice and medical approaches.

I’m now undertaking a PhD titled “Land, food and health in a post-industrial city: community history, contamination and leveraging more equitable action in Glasgow’s urban planning agenda”, under the supervision of Dr Tony Robertson, Prof David Copplestone, Dr Sandra Engstrom, Dr Wendy Masterton, and Dr Ines Branco-Illodo.

My research centres on land use and development in parts of post-industrial North Glasgow that have experienced significant change and re-development over time. The first phase is grounded in learning from and recording community history—focusing on how people who live or have lived in these areas understand, remember and navigate change, particularly in places that have often been excluded from planning decisions. The project explores how community voices and lived experiences can be better represented in discussions around land, wellbeing and urban development.

My work is driven by a commitment to challenging deficit-based or pathologising approaches to working-class communities. Too often, health and planning systems treat such places—and the people who live there—as problems to be fixed, rather than as sites of knowledge, care, and culture. After entering more elitist professional spaces myself, I became more aware of how widespread the misrepresentation of working-class communities can be, and how often structural discrimination is dismissed or overlooked. My research instead builds a strengths-based, place-based understanding of wellbeing—one that centres cultural memory and community history.

I use participatory and creative methods including walking oral histories, photovoice, group discussions and fieldnote-led ethnography. These conversations are shaping a visual display and evolving archive that brings together local stories, places and memories. I hope to donate this to the city archives and create a public webpage so that the history and voices of the area are preserved and more accessible in future.

The second phase of the research will explore how communities engage with urban green space and agroecological approaches in the context of land use and regeneration—situating these within the longer histories shared in the first phase. The third and final phase will focus on stakeholder perspectives and public-facing education, engaging with planners, policymakers and educators around the insights generated through the project.

Previous to and alongside my PhD, I led community workshops and Medical Research Council–funded Public Health Intervention Development (MRC PHIND) work packages as part of the Physical Activity and Social Connectedness (PACES) in Healthy Ageing study at the Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow. This work focuses on participatory systems co-design and community capacity building to support more equitable public health action in a community setting. I’ve been exploring and experimenting with participatory approaches and how systems thinking can support public health research, intervention development and evaluation, and community practice. A systems-based approach takes us beyond an individualist or behaviouralist approach, and looks at the wider social, ecological and structural factors that influence health and wellbeing, and helps us understand how different processes of a system interact and shape people’s lives over time. My role was situated within the 'Complexity in Health' workstream.

Previously, I worked with the lead for curriculum development, Dr Muna Al Jawad, at Brighton and Sussex Medical School to support more inclusive and participatory approaches to medical education. This included bringing social class more clearly into equality, diversity and inclusion work, and exploring the experiences of medical students from underserved backgrounds navigating what is still often felt to be an elitist profession. We used creative tools, including comics, to open up conversations about our class, representation and belonging in medical training.

Beyond academia, I’ve spent over a decade volunteering in community advocacy projects focused on dignified healthcare, equitable access to services, food justice and agroecology.

Prizes and Awards:

• Brighton Medicochirurgical Award (Silver) for Best Dissertation, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, 2021.
• The Sue Eckstein Prize for Medical Humanities, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, 2022.
• Rewarding Contribution Award, for Personal Contributions and Exceptional Achievements in Creating a Shared Learning and Research Environment, University of Glasgow, 2023/24.

Social epidemiology; epistemology of risk communication and management; land use and access; contamination; exposome; experiences of food insecurity; cultural studies; relational, embodiment and ecological approaches; participatory systems methods; food justice; agroecology; cultural representation; cultural wellbeing

Intersectionality seminar on Race and Racism in Healthcare module, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, 2019.

Graduate Teaching Assistant - Tutor for Applied Qualitative Research Skills - MSc Dissertations, University of Stirling, July 2025 - onwards