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 third-year modules:
- Gender, Body, Power
- Health, Illness and Society
Health, Illness and Society focuses on the entwining of health with ideologies and inequalities. We consider ways in which health, illness and medicine are neither natural nor neutral, but invested with culturally and historically specific meaning. While health and illness are bodily and physical, they are also socially and politically produced, as well as intimately entangled with power to define and treat afflictions, and to judge those who may be afflicted.
Gender, Body, Power is premised on bodies not being simply ‘natural’. Rather, our bodies embody the social, while the social imbues our embodied experience. Power and powerlessness suffuse, inscribe, and discipline bodies. Our bodies are read as signs of our identities, but also seen to embody our success in measuring up to myriad social values. While the body is shaped and evaluated in relation social norms, the body is also something more. It is through our feeling bodies that we exist in and know the world, as well as connect with others.
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.
