My research is broadly concerned with how the political economy of knowledge production in public sector settings shapes what becomes knowable, whose labour is recognised, and whose needs are served. My work can be divided into two complementary and overlapping strands:
Research on Research within Public Sector Settings
The NHS has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, repositioning itself not only as a care organisation but as a research organisation – one whose data, infrastructure, and patient populations are increasingly understood as assets with scientific and economic value. My work examines what this transformation means in practice: how research is organised, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and for whose benefit.
A central concern is the adoption of platform capitalism logics within this public sector context. Platforms are not simply technical systems. They are organisational forms that shape how research is imagined, structured, and conducted, and that reconfigure relationships between citizens, the state, and private enterprise. My work asks what happens to knowledge, equity, and public value when these logics take hold in regulatory-constrained environments like the NHS.
My PhD, supervised by Professor Christine Hauskeller and Professor Dana Wilson-Kovacs examined how crime scene investigators in England and Wales navigate complex organisational and epistemic cultures within policing, drawing into relief the intricate relationships and expertise involved in accomplishing forensic science in routine practice, largely invisible in wider accounts. I subsequently worked with Professor Dana Wilson-Kovacs on part of her ESRC-funded project (ES/R00742X/1), Understanding the Use of Digital Forensics in Policing in England and Wales: An Ethnographic Analysis of Current Practices and Professional Dynamics. As part of this project, we examined the professional and organisational tensions surrounding the introduction of accreditation standards in digital forensics, arguing that a social science perspective illuminates why a field still seeking disciplinary stabilisation encountered these requirements with considerable resistance. Together this work offers a comparative lens on how scientific knowledge is produced and legitimised across different public sector settings, and informs a developing strand of research examining parallels between health research and digital forensics platforms.
Invisible Labour and Equity in Health Research
Knowledge production depends on work that is rarely seen and rarely rewarded. My research foregrounds the actors who make research possible but who remain largely invisible within it — from database managers and patient recruiters to the communities whose data underpins large-scale health research but whose needs it may never address.
This invisibility operates at two levels. At the level of labour, I examine how essential contributions to research, particularly in translational and data-intensive contexts, are systematically unrecognised. At the level of populations, I examine how particular communities are structurally absent from the knowledge being produced, or present only on terms that do not serve them. Crucially, the communities most marginalised by health research are not simply absent. They often hold well-founded critical knowledge about research institutions, grounded in historical and lived experience of how those institutions have failed them. Where mainstream inclusion agendas tend to frame low participation as a problem of access or hesitancy to be overcome, my work takes seriously the rational basis of institutional distrust, shifting the analytical gaze toward what institutions must do to become worthy of community trust.
This concern with who gets included in research, and on whose terms, extends beyond critique to practice. In my applied research with stroke survivors, I am developing approaches to patient and public involvement that can accommodate people with complex stroke-related impairments, individuals routinely excluded not through intention but through the limitations of standard methods and norms. Read more about this work here.
Key Publications
For those with university access, the publisher’s link is provided below. When not published open access, this is followed by a link to the most up-to-date version I can provide without breaching the publisher’s copyright.
Cowan, H., Wyatt, D. & Smeets, S. (2025) ‘‘Hell No!’—Exploring Scepticism in UK Health Research Since COVID-19 Amongst Communities Who Have Been Labelled ‘Underserved’,’ Sociology of Health & Illness 47(8), e70110 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70110
Published open access.
Faulkner-Gurstein, R. & Wyatt, D. (Joint first author) (2023) ‘Platform NHS: Reconfiguring a public service in the age of digital capitalism’, Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211055697
Published open access.
Wilson-Kovacs, D. and Wyatt, D. (2023) ‘The long journey of resistance toward acceptance: Understanding digital forensic accreditation in England and Wales from a social science perspective, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Forensic Science.
https://doi.org/10.1002/wfs2.1501
Published open access.
Faulkner-Gurstein, R., Wyatt, D., Cowan, H., Hare, N., Harris, C. & Wolfe, C. (2022) ‘The organization and impacts of clinical research delivery workforce redeployment during the COVID‐19 pandemic: a qualitative case study of one research‐intensive acute hospital trust’, Health Research Policy and Systems. 20(68). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-022-00876-5
Published open access.
Wyatt D., Faulkner-Gurstein, R., Cowan, H. & Wolfe, C. (2021) Impacts of covid-19 on clinical research in the UK: a multi-method qualitative case study. PLOS ONE. 16(8): e0256871.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256871
Published open access.
Wyatt, D., Lampon, S. & McKevitt, C. (2020) ‘Delivering healthcare’s ‘triple aim’: Electronic Health Records and the health research participant in the UK National Health Service’, Sociology of Health & Illness. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13101
Published open access.
Wyatt, D., Cook, J. and McKevitt, C. (2018) ‘Participation in the BioResource: Biobanking and value in the changing NHS’ Tecnoscienza 9(2) 89-108. (Special issue on biobanking).
http://www.tecnoscienza.net/index.php/tsj/article/download/358/225
Published open access.
Wyatt, D., Cook, J. and McKevitt, C. (2018) ‘Perceptions of the uses of routine general practice data beyond individual care in England: a qualitative study’ BMJ Open. 8
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-019378
Published open access.
Caffrey, L., Wyatt, D., Fudge, N., Mattingley, H., Williamson, C. and McKevitt, C. (2016) ‘Gender Equity Programmes in Academic Medicine: a Realist Evaluation approach to Athena SWAN processes’ BMJ Open 6.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012090
Published open access
Wyatt, D. (2014) ‘Practising Crime Scene Investigation: Trace and contamination in routine work’ Policing and Society 24(4) 443-458.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2013.868460.
Open access version (final draft post-refereeing) can be found here.
Wilson-Kovacs, D., Wyatt, D. and Hauskeller, C. (2012) ‘“A Faustian bargain?” Public voices on forensic DNA technologies and the National DNA Database’, New Genetics and Society 31(3) 285-298.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2012.687085.
Open access version (final draft post-refereeing) can be found here.
Full publication list available at https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5859-7389