My research asks how health is produced, governed and sustained through people’s bodies and the places they live. Its guiding question is: how do we heal, and what conditions make this possible?
I am completing my PhD in Geography at University College Dublin as an Ad Astra Scholar. My work draws on critical health and wellbeing geography, feminist geography and cultural anthropology, alongside professional experience in clinical dance therapy, migration, community health and the arts.
Doctoral research
My doctoral research examines how migration governance shapes access to healthcare and everyday experiences of care in Turin, Italy. It draws on fieldwork conducted in 2024–2025 at a volunteer-run migrant clinic and in reception settings, combining ethnography, oral histories, interviews and clinical dance therapy.
I investigate how volunteer doctors, cultural mediators and migrant women sustain care, and how administrative procedures and accommodation arrangements shape movement, autonomy and wellbeing. My contribution connects the spatial and institutional organisation of care to embodied experience. I examine the practical work involved in keeping healthcare accessible and the relationships through which people establish continuity and support.
This research develops an account of therapeutic body-landscapes, examining how movement, gesture, rest and relationships participate in making places of care. It also traces the labour through which volunteers hold access open within a changing public healthcare system.
Methods and practice
My methodological work considers how embodied practice contributes to geographical knowledge. Through clinical dance therapy, I attend to how people move, occupy space, respond to others and participate at their own pace. I bring these observations into dialogue with spoken accounts and the institutional conditions of everyday life.
Consent, cultural sensitivity and sustained relationships guide this work. My practice requires attention to the circumstances in which participation becomes possible, including the organisation of sessions, the use of shared space and participants’ changing needs.
Alongside my doctorate, I co-coordinate the Mother–Child Hub at Camminare Insieme in Turin and facilitate clinical dance therapy groups. This role involves multidisciplinary coordination, participant engagement and support for prenatal and postnatal care among migrant women and families.
Experience and research exchange
My research builds on three decades of work across community health, migration, education and the arts. Earlier roles include collaboration with Darpana Performing Arts in Ahmedabad, artistic direction of Teatro Espace in Turin and the founding and direction of the Moving Bodies Festival. These experiences inform my approach to participatory research, facilitation and project leadership.
As principal investigator and co-organiser, I secured funding for and co-led Migration Beyond Emergency at UCD in 2026, bringing together 52 presenters. As postgraduate representative of the Royal Geographical Society’s Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group, I also co-created and hosted ENRGHI in Bristol in 2025 and developed its “Blue Bodies” theme.
My research on volunteer doctors features in the United Nations Volunteers’ 2026 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report. UCD’s College of Social Sciences and Law has also featured my doctoral work in its research case-study series.
Current directions and collaboration
I am developing a research programme on the conditions through which women’s embodied practices of care become sustained infrastructures of support. This work focuses on prenatal and postnatal care, migration, gender and the organisation of welfare.
I welcome enquiries about research roles, consultancy and collaborative projects involving qualitative research, participatory methods, migrant health, access to care and embodied approaches to wellbeing.
Contact: ambrabergamasco@gmail.com
