Dr Julie Cook

Julie is a Research Fellow in our Applied Health Research Hub (AHRh), leading the Academic Research Facilitation and Delivery Unit. Her main role is research-based. However, she also teaches research ethics, based in her own research and practice. This draws on 17 years of largely European Commission-funded research projects in international justice and ethics in health-related issues.

She has published in research ethics, women's health, and (eco)feminist theory/philosophy, which came together in her 2022 PhD by Published Works, At the intersection: Bringing an ecofeminist perspective to empirical (bio)ethics and equity in international research. Her main methodological interests are in (feminist) conceptual analysis and qualitative research. Her research forms part of the contemporary movement against Ethics Dumping (off-shoring of unethical research practices) and exploitation of vulnerable research participants.

Julie has a background since the 1980s in national health promotion in the NHS, and national campaigning around women’s health issues in the voluntary sector. She has also worked at local level in the North West providing women’s health services and has been a community representative around reproductive health/maternity issues and user representation in NHS service development.

She joined our Centre for Professional Ethics in 2005. Since, she has contributed to a range of European Commission-funded projects around international justice and ethics in health and science and technology issues as researcher, writer and editor, and on project and compliance management issues. Since 2014, Julie has been located in our (current incarnation) Applied Health Research Hub Academic Research Facilitation and Delivery Unit, which provides academic support to researchers across the university, broadening her experience in academic disciplines beyond philosophy, to connect with her original commitments to women's health. She has a developing interest in supporting people from a variety of backgrounds to make the transition to being an academic researcher, and with academic writing.

Julie is currently a Member of the Joint Independent Ethics Committee for the Lancashire Police and Crime Commissioner and Chief Constable (2023-27).

Background

Julie developed the original women's health promotion initiatives around the introduction of the national breast and cervical cancer screening programmes at the NHS Health Education Authority in the late 1980s. She then ran award-winning women’s health and environment campaigns around sanitary protection and menstrual health issues, including the successful campaign for warning labels about toxic shock syndrome on tampon packs, for the London-based Women's Environmental Network (WEN) through the early 1990s. She co-founded the UK's first certificated course on ecofeminism at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1994.

She worked within the anti-vivisection (Assistant Campaigns Director, BUAV), and pro-choice movements (Information and Communications Officer, SATFA), before carrying out postgraduate research into the tensions between activism and academia, theory and practice, in the Philosophy Department at the University of Lancaster (1995-8). In the early 2000s she worked as an advocate and counsellor providing voluntary sector women's maternal mental health services (Post-natal Illness, Cumbria). As a community representative and health activist she co-ordinated the Lancaster Home & Natural Birth Support Group for several years, and was a member of the Lancaster & Morecambe Community Health Council, and a user representative on the Morecambe Bay Maternity Services Liaison Committee until resigning in 2002.