Issie MacPhail

Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Highlands & Islands
issie.macphail@uhi.ac.uk
2017 Cruciblist

Issie is a Postdoctoral Researcher at The UHI Division of Health Research, Rural Health & Wellbeing. She has just completed 3 years work on the AHRC funded Representing Communities project, exploring how one might use creative descriptions and representations of emplaced communities as new forms of ‘evidence’ for the development of health and wellbeing policy. She completed her PhD titled ‘Land, Crofting and The Assynt Crofters Trust: A Post-colonial Geography?’, with University of Wales, Lampeter.

Issie has a significant track record in ‘action research’ methods and was a Scottish Community Action Fund (SCARF) Mentor throughout the life of this programme (2002 – 2009). Through her croft-based consultancy business, Assynt Research & Consultancy (ARC), she delivered numerous community projects and achieved significant capacity building for small business and voluntary sector growth in the rural Highlands, 2002 – 2014. In 2005, she enabled community co-writing of the book ‘At Home in Mackay Country: a history and profile of the communities of north west Sutherland’. She has been an Honorary Research Fellow at The School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, since 2001. Issie has worked extensively with artists and craftworkers in the past decade and has created, curated and co-produced a number of ground-breaking cultural events in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Her principal research interests areIssie is a Postdoctoral Researcher at The UHI Division of Health Research, Rural Health & Wellbeing.

She has just completed 3 years work on the AHRC funded Representing Communities project, exploring how one might use creative descriptions and representations of emplaced communities as new forms of ‘evidence’ for the development of health and wellbeing policy.

She completed her PhD titled ‘Land, Crofting and The Assynt Crofters Trust: A Post-colonial Geography?’, with University of Wales, Lampeter. Issie has a significant track record in ‘action research’ methods and was a Scottish Community Action Fund (SCARF) Mentor throughout the life of this programme (2002 – 2009). Through her croft-based consultancy business, Assynt Research & Consultancy (ARC), she delivered numerous community projects and achieved significant capacity building for small business and voluntary sector growth in the rural Highlands, 2002 – 2014. In 2005, she enabled community co-writing of the book ‘At Home in Mackay Country: a history and profile of the communities of north west Sutherland’. She has been an Honorary Research Fellow at The School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, since 2001.

Issie has worked extensively with artists and craftworkers in the past decade and has created, curated and co-produced a number of ground-breaking cultural events in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Her principal research interests are

• Histories of regional and rural medicine, drawing on histories of Highlands & Islands development industry
• Outdoor environment and health linkages
• Community asset ownership as a means of action for wellbeing
• Cultural amnesia; emergent neurological framing of lives lived; ontology in life sciences
• The production of historical knowledge, and contemporary and historical representations, of the Highlands and Highlanders
• Methods and material practices in social science and humanities research
• Arts, craft and performance in practices of community engagement, co-production, co-creation
• Rural health humanities