Upcoming Seminar - 'What is the Problem Represented to Be?' as a tool for exposing injustice in health governance.

Rebecca Muir, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Primary Care, Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London will be presenting the following seminar:

Seminar Title: 'What is the Problem Represented to Be?' as a tool for exposing injustice in health governance.

Abstract: The 'What is the Problem Represented to Be?' (WPR) approach offers a systematic framework for interrogating how policies construct the problems they purport to solve, making visible the political assumptions embedded in technical governance. This seminar argues that WPR has significant, underexploited potential as a tool for exposing injustice in health governance, and presents methodological innovations that extend this potential further.

I draw on a study of NHS-IVF clinical access restrictions in England to demonstrate WPR in practice. Examining Body Mass Index (BMI) thresholds as a focal point, I show how an 'evidence-based' governing logic depoliticises what are fundamentally value-laden decisions about who deserves NHS fertility care. WPR cuts through this depoliticisation, revealing how clinical restrictions function as governance mechanisms, how responsibility for access is displaced onto individual women, and how the political choices embedded in NHS-IVF rationing are rendered invisible by their technical framing.

I then present two original methodological innovations that deepen WPR's capacity to expose these injustices. The first extends WPR to lived experience data, enabling analysis of how governance logics are absorbed, negotiated, and resisted by the people they act upon; surfacing harms that policy analysis alone cannot reach. The second is a collaborative WPR method, involving people with lived experience of NHS-IVF restrictions as co-analysts, and reflecting on what expertise-by-experience contributes to the analytical process.

Together, these innovations advance WPR's core commitment to making politics visible, and speak to its potential as a critical methodology for health governance research more broadly.

Location: DRMC/Nine DTP Hub Boardroom, 1st Floor, Arthur Holmes Building, left of The Calman Learning Centre, upstairs & turn left. 

This will be a hybrid event. Click here for online access.