Dr Sinead O'Connor

BA (Hons) European Studies, PhD Human Geography, University College Cork

Dr Sinead O'Connor

Senior Lecturer

Department of Geography and Earth Sciences

Contact Details

 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. 

Foundation Year Programme Leader

 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. 

Countering ‘obesity truths’: Operation Transformation and reality television as governance. / O'Connor, Sinead.
In: Social and Cultural Geography, 02.09.2025, p. 1-20.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

The racial economy of Instagram. / O'Connor, Sinéad.
In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 49, No. 3, e12642, 02.08.2024.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Exchange and twinning in an age of borders: (inter)nationalism, mobility, encounter, and participation. / O'Connor, Sinead; Goodwin-Hawkins, Bryonny; Jones, Rhys Dafydd.
2020. RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2020, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Research output: Contribution to conference › Other

The intersectional geographies of international students in Ireland: Connecting spaces of encounter and belonging. / O'Connor, Sinead.
In: Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 10, 02.10.2020, p. 1460-1480.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Problematising strategic internationalisation: Tensions and conflicts between international student recruitment and integration policy in Ireland. / O'Connor, Sinead.
In: Globalisation, Societies and Education, No. 3 , 22.12.2017, p. 339-352.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

More publications on the Research Portal