Sinead O'Connor

 I'm currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences here at Aberystwyth and I am the programme leader for our integrated foundation year schemes. I moved to Aberystwyth after I completed my PhD at University College Cork, Ireland in 2016. My PhD work explored the geographies of encounter, the politics of difference, migration, and the internationalisation of Higher Education. Recently, my work has turned to feminism, post-feminism, social media, and the geographies of the body. I have a particular interest in neo-liberal post-feminism, discourses and representations of body size in digital spaces, online social justice movements, and the intersections of raced and gendered beauty ideals. 

 At the moment, I'm looking at the ways in which digital technology is shaping discourses around the body through an intersectional lens. I'm particularly interested in body size, fatness, race, gender, and post-feminism. I engage with the ways in which social justice movements - like body positivity, fat liberation, and self-care - are colonised and appropriated by white middle-class women, reproducing racialised/white supremacist beauty ideals. 

Foundation Year Programme Leader