Cora Salkovskis

Primary research areas

Cora Salkovskis works as a historian in the medical humanities, exploring the social and historical life of concepts such as disorder, ethics, vulnerability, resilience, and trust. Her research considers how subjective and culturally-prescient vocabularies come into conversation with the psychological sciences, psychopathology or clinical languages, and health policy.

Current research

Cora Salkovskis' current research is on the mental health experiences of ‘frontline’ healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Drawing on media reporting and oral history interviews conducted with medical staff, caregivers, and policy-making organisations, Salkovskis considers discussions, debates and testimonies regarding mental health in the context of both COVID-19 and a pre-existing strain on public healthcare services in the UK.

Her research looks at the personal, political and psychiatric and psychological responses to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the ’second pandemic’; an emerging mental health crisis in which charity helpline calls soared, and ‘urgent’ and ‘emergency’ service referrals for a broad spectrum of mental health issues spiked in both the wider population and healthcare workers themselves.

Whilst these issues pre-dated the pandemic, Salkovskis considers how conditions of immediate and acute crisis changed the narrative around mental health and public service. In particular, she examines the ways in which COVID-19, and the social, political, and cultural reaction to it, created a militarised health landscape in which doctors, nurses, psychologists, and carers found themselves on a ‘frontline’, ‘fighting’ an unseen enemy, asked to ‘sacrifice’ their personal safety, and being labelled ‘heroes’.

She considers whether frontline workers and those who experienced disrupted, compromised, or withdrawn care believed that the system bent or broke. Her research focuses on the use of concepts such as ‘trauma’, ‘burnout’, ‘resilience’ and ‘moral injury’ in this context to explore how far acceptance of such ‘bending’ was reliant on notions of legitimacy and trust in policy-makers and formal structures of representatives of authority (whether medical or political) to create coherent and ethical systems in a time of personal, professional and global ‘crisis’.

Project

Salkovskis is a postdoctoral research fellow on the project "Wars, Pandemics and the Human Mind" (2023-2024). This project explores the science and politics of trauma in the 21st century. It considers how trauma is understood and governed today across three case studies in the military and healthcare, producing critical reflections on how the psychological sciences shape the way societies understand and try to manage the human effects of extreme events.

Salkovskis’ strand of the project considers the social dynamics of healthcare in crisis and the ways in which concepts from both the military and the psychological sciences were used in and adapted to public health during the pandemic. Her research focuses on historical questions of identity, health policy, protest, mental health, and the movement of ideas.