Dr Ed Kiely

Dr Ed Kiely (they/them) is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

Ed is a critical health geographer with interests in feminist political economy, comparative methods and trans studies. Their research investigates the causes and consequences of healthcare inequalities. How are social differences – in particular, differences of race, sex and gender – produced in and through healthcare institutions? And what are the impacts on those who are marked as different?

To date, Ed’s work has focussed on mental health services, and gender-affirming care provision. This has included both largescale, quantitative studies – for instance, examining regional inequalities in the distribution of health spending – and qualitative and participatory approaches, to interrogate the everyday practices through which inequalities are reproduced in healthcare institutions.

Ed completed their PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge in 2023, with a thesis examining the impacts of austerity on mental health provision in England. They were a Temporary Postdoctoral Fellow at Amsterdam UMC, where they led a groundbreaking comparative study of a transgender healthcare systems across the EU.

In 2024, they were awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, for a project examining the geographies of involuntary psychiatric detention (‘sectioning’). The research uses participant observation to investigate institutional cultures and decision-making practices within mental health crisis teams, to understand how these might contribute to racialised differences in detention rates.

Ed’s work has been published in leading geographical and interdisciplinary journals, including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Antipode, Geoforum, Social Science & Medicine, Critical Social Policy, Environment and Planning A: Politics and Space, and the International Journal of Transgender Health. They are a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.