Career Details

Dr Ana Porroche-Escudero is a senior research associate working on an exciting international project “Unlocking Resilient Benefits from African Water Resources” which is funded by UKRI GCRF through the ARUA Water Centre of Excellence at Rhodes University, South Africa. She joined Lancaster Environment Centre in January 2021.

She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Sussex University, where she worked as an Associate Tutor in Anthropology and Development studies (2009-2014) and convened a course on Global Health at the Summer School (2012-2014). Prior to that she completed a MA in Women’s Studies from York and BAs in Anthropology and Social Work from the Universities of Barcelona and Zaragoza respectively.

Porroche-Escudero’s research interests revolve around gender and health, cultures of knowledge, inequalities, feminist methodologies, qualitative methodologies, applied health research, research capacity building, evaluation of complex interventions, implementation and public involvement in research and praxis.

Porroche-Escudero has undertaken ethnographic research in Spain and the UK. For the past 16 years she has worked on issues related to gender, health and inequalities. On this work she has co-edited Feminist perspectives on breast cancer (Bellaterra and Vic University with Gerard Coll-Planas and Caterina Riba) and Culture and society. Conceptual legacies and contemporary applications (Palgrave, with Elizabeth Ettorre, Ellen Annandale, Vanessa Hildebrand and Barbara K. Rothman), published scholarly articles and book chapters. Writing for newspapers and practitioners newsletters, as well as participating in interviews and numerous public discussions around critical breast cancer issues with activists, scholars, and practitioners, she reflected on the links between the breast cancer pink culture and gender violence. This reflection developed into an article which has been shared in social media over 31,000 times and led to numerous talks in practitioner organizations and activist boards. This work was the recipient of the Barbara Rosenblum Dissertation Award endowed by Sociologists for Women in Society.

Her interests on issues of inequalities, knowledge production and public involvement research led her to join Lancaster Division of Health Research as a senior researcher for the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast (ARC NWC) (2014-2021). In this role she worked closely with Prof. Jennie Popay to coproduce the Health Inequalities Assessment Toolkit and develop a theoretically informed approach to embed a health equity focus in research collaborations that they coined “Health Equity Mainstreaming”. She continues her collaboration with Prof Popay in this area in an School of Public Health Research (SPHR) funded project.

While at ARC, Porroche-Escudero also completed 2 major evaluations that aimed to explain and bridge the evidence-practice gap. The first was CLAHRC-NWC internal evaluation drawing on implementation science and social innovation. The second project was CLAHRC (now ARC) Neighbourhood Resilience Programme - an intervention and evaluation of local authority and community lead evidence-based actions to reduce health inequalities by promoting systems resilience in 10 neighbourhoods. Resulting outputs include a chapter titled “Supporting local systems to tackle the social determinants of health inequalities” published by the World Health Organisation, and an animation on air (in)equality co-produced with residents and colleagues from Lancaster Environment Centre.

At LEC she works with Professor Frances Cleaver to deliver the social aspects of the ARUA RESBEN project in collaboration with African and UK country partners.

In her free time she teaches mantrailing at WonderDog Mantrailing Lancaster. You can also find her training and playing with her dogs Bilboa and Edarra, making paper collage children illustrations and learning to upcycle garments.