Dr Cheer Cheng

Profile

I am an interdisciplinary sociologist working across the sociology of health and illness, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and medical humanities. My research explores how health, illness and care are understood and negotiated across different forms of knowledge, technologies and everyday experience. I am particularly interested in the boundaries between health and illness, relationships between lived experience and professional or scientific knowledge, and the role of technologies in shaping everyday life and practices of care.

At Queen Mary University of London, I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Involvement and Engagement on the Parkinson’s Clinical Cohorts Collaborative (PC3), based at the Centre for Preventive Neurology. My work focuses on developing patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) across the programme, alongside research exploring public perspectives on health data, data linkage, trust and research governance. Through this work, I am interested in how experiential knowledge and public perspectives can shape the development and governance of large-scale health databases.

My doctoral research at the University of Sheffield examined “suboptimal health” (亚健康) in contemporary China as a category occupying the space between health and disease. Drawing on qualitative and multi-sited ethnographic research, I explored how this category was produced and negotiated across medicine, public health, commercial practices and everyday life. My subsequent research has extended these interests into ageing, dementia and technology, including work examining how technologies are recommended, selected and incorporated into everyday life by people living with dementia and carers.

Alongside my research in health and care, I collaborate on interdisciplinary projects spanning sociology, artificial intelligence and creative practice. This includes work with artists using interactive AI, film and new media art to explore memory, collective experience and human–technology relations. Across my research, I am interested in methodological approaches that bring social science into conversation with participatory, creative and experimental practices.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests include sociology of health and illness; Science and Technology Studies (STS); medical humanities; patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE); health data, trust and governance; health technologies and digital health; ageing and dementia; qualitative and participatory methods; arts-based and experimental methods; and health and medicine in contemporary China.

Publications

JavaException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal character in path at index 71: https://researchpublications.its.qmul.ac.uk/publications/data/“Am I in ‘suboptimal health’?: the narratives and rhetoric in carving out the grey area between health and illness in everyday life”\nhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.70005\n“Ethico-racial positioning in campaigns for COVID-19 research and vaccination featuring public figures”\nhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.13748\n“A Walled City: An Interactive AI Artwork for Decentralized Urban Memories and Collective Presence”\nhttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3816084\nReCollection: Creating synthetic memories with AI in an interactive art installation\nhttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664207.xml