Lauren Milor

Project Title: (In)visible bodies, images, Instagram: Exploring the possibilities of becoming through young women’s production and circulation of health and fitness related image content
Start date: October 2017

Summary of Research Area

ESRC Funded (+3)

My thesis is exploring how young women use Instagram to produce and circulate images that they have taken as part of their bodily management goals, focusing on what images can do in these particular contexts, in relation to how women’s bodies become lived and experienced.

In doing so, I am interested in exploring what these practices can tell us about contemporary notions of embodiment and health. While dieting, bodily management and exercise are not new topics of research in feminist scholarship, I am interested in how the embodied practices, knowledges and techniques that are involved in image taking, and the mediation of these practices by the affordances of Instagram, may shape or facilitate different and possibly more intense ways of managing and experiencing the body. In doing so, this research will explore how the possibilities of particular bodies may be expanded and/or limited in different ways through these practices of image viewing, production and circulation.

Teaching Duties

This semester I am teaching on the Level 3 Module The Social Life of Data. Over the last academic year, I have taught on the Level 1 Module Sociology of Modern Societies and the Level 3 Module The Sociology of Consumerism.

Your thoughts on the University, SSP and the City?

I’ve been a part of SSP since 2012 when I started my undergraduate degree in Sociology. I decided to pursue postgraduate studies in the form of an MA and a PhD here because of the support and expertise from staff and other students within in the department. The University has the best of both worlds as it is a campus university so you have everything you need in one place, while being right on the edge of the city centre.