Dr Hester Hockin-Boyers

Assistant Professor

ORCID profile

Affiliations
Affiliation
Assistant Professor in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

Hester joined the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences in 2022 following a lectureship at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). Prior to this, Hester completed a BSc in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, an MPhil in Gender Studies at Cambridge University and a PhD in Sociology/Sport and Exercise Sciences at Durham University. Hester has also spent time as a research fellow at overseas institutions such as the University of Adelaide and the University of British Columbia.

Hester is a qualitative researcher, whose work exists at the intersection of health, gender, and digital media. Her current research seeks to better understand how individuals who struggle with eating disorders can engage with exercise in ways that are supportive to their mental health and wellbeing. Hester also conducts research exploring how health experiences are communicated on social media platforms. For example, by studying memes and other digital artefacts as a way of understanding peoples’ experiences of (ill)health and ‘meeting participants where they are’ by engaging with the textual/visual content they create or engage with online. This research is often conducted using a feminist theoretical lens.

Hester's digital media work has focused on how specific populations agentically curate their social media feeds, in the context of eating disorder recovery (Hockin-Boyers et al, 2021), as an anti-racist tactic (Hockin-Boyers and Clifford-Astbury, 2021), and more recently as a method of combatting racially biased social media algorithms (publication forthcoming). This work seeks to interrogate how, in the face of neoliberal ‘light-touch’ platform regulation, individuals are required to generate their own personally relevant content regulation strategies to protect their wellbeing.

Hester is a qualitative researcher specialising in digital methods, with additional experience with digital ethnography, longitudinal and in-depth interviews, multimodal discourse analysis, as well as creative and visual research techniques.