I am a sociologist and I am fascinated by bodies, identities, and power. I am interested in embodied practices, bodily processes, and products used to embellish, invigorate, and manage bodies and selves. Intersecting identities and enduring inequalities are central to my thinking.
My BA (in Religious Studies), MA (in Religion, Culture & Society) and PhD (in Sociology) are all from Lancaster University. Before starting at York St John University in 2018, I worked for 10 years at Smith College USA, where I was a tenured Associate Professor in Sociology. I was also briefly an Honorary Visiting Fellow and a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of York.
I am keen to supervise qualitative PhD research pertaining to gender, the body, health and wellbeing, and medical education.
My teaching draws on my research into the gendered body, reproduction of inequality, therapeutic thinking, complementary and alternative medicines, wellbeing, affect and emotion, and medical education. While my teaching is research-led, my research also intimately entwines with and benefits from my teaching.
I convene and teach the following modules:
- Gender, Body, Power
- Sickness & Society
Sickness & Society focuses on the ways in which ill health – our own, or of those we love – reaches us all, one way or another. With sickness comes suffering and loss. Sickness may be felt in the body, but it can also reach deeper, into one’s very sense of the self. There can be something deeply unjust about sickness, also because it so readily entwines with broader social and economic inequity and injustice. Sickness & Society considers sickness as socially produced. We explore the ways in which understandings and experiences of sickness are neither natural nor neutral but shaped by culturally and historically specific knowledges, as well as by an unequal distribution of power and resources. Powerful systems of knowledge, and subtle judgements of people and their bodies, produce sickness and shape experiences of affliction.
Gender, Body, Power is premised on bodies not being simply ‘natural’. Social ideas suffuse the most private, and the most taken-for-granted. At the same time, privileges and resources impact what bodies can be and do. Not every body has the power or freedom that other bodies enjoy. Sex and bodies provide a lens for seeing the reach of the social over what we experience as deeply personal, inherently natural, and freely chosen. Underneath our desires and choices lie norms and expectations that compel us to be certain kinds of bodies and people. We are shaped by the social in ways that often remain hidden. As such, seeing and perhaps even challenging the hold of the social over the personal is no easy task to undertake.
This module traces the social in the personal, the intimate, and the embodied. We analyse the body as both individual and social, and as something we ought to pay careful, sociological attention to. To live and to love better, we must find the social in the bodily and the private.
I study configurations of power, representation, legitimacy and meaning in the domains of gender and embodiment, health and wellbeing, and medicine and medical education. I consider identities and shifting social values as central to understanding medical work and health seeking, but also the ways in which bodies and health practices are understood and evaluated. I am captivated by the manner in which gendered and sexual bodies are represented, and by the ways in which social and cultural ideas entwine with embodied experience.
Recent publications
I serve on the Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, and I hold an honorary position, the Title of Docent, in Sociology at University of Turku in Finland.
