Dr Abi MacDonald

Abi qualified as a medical doctor in 2022, then completed a master’s in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently undertaking a PhD titled 'Land, food and health in a post-industrial city: community history, contamination and leveraging more equitable agroecological action in Glasgow’s urban planning agenda', under the supervision of Dr Tony Robertson, Prof David Copplestone, Dr Sandra Engstrom, Dr Wendy Masterton, and Dr Ines Branco-Illodo.

Her research explores the possibilities and limitations of place-based food systems as pathways toward health equity in marginalised post-industrial neighbourhoods. Centred on areas of North Glasgow, the project examines how land, contamination, food access, and urban planning are understood and experienced by communities historically excluded from environmental and planning decision-making. It asks how risk is produced, perceived, communicated, and governed—and how planning or public health frameworks may obscure or reinforce uneven exposures to harm.

Abi’s work is driven by a commitment to challenging deficit-based or pathologising approaches to working-class communities. Too often, health and planning systems treat such places and the people who live there, as problems to be fixed, rather than as sites of knowledge, care, and culture. Her research instead builds a strengths-based, place-based understanding of wellbeing—one that centres cultural memory, and community history. She uses participatory and creative methods including walking oral histories, photovoice, community discussion, and fieldnote-led ethnography. She is exploring and co-developing a “living map”: an evolving archive of community history.

Alongside her PhD, Abi has led the community workshops and Medical Research Council funded Public Health Intervention Development (MRC PHIND) work packages for the Physical Activity and Social Connectedness (PACES) in Healthy Ageing study at the Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow. This work focuses on participatory systems co-design and community capacity building to support equitable action development.

Previously, she worked with Dr Muna Al Jawad at Brighton and Sussex Medical School to support intersectional participatory approaches to medical education, through the use of comics. Beyond academia, Abi has spent over a decade volunteering in various community advocacy projects focused on dignified healthcare, access to healthcare, food justice, and agroecology.

Social epidemiology; epistemology of risk communication and management; land use and access; contamination; exposome; experiences of food insecurity; cultural studies; relational, embodiment and ecological approaches; participatory systems methods; food justice; agroecology; cultural representation; cultural wellbeing

Intersectionality seminar on Race and Racism in Healthcare module, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, 2019.

Graduate Teaching Assistant - Tutor for Applied Qualitative Research Skills - MSc Dissertations, University of Stirling, July 2025 - onwards