ℹ️ Please note that the event will be held in a hybrid format (Grosvenor East and Online).

Overview

This panel brings together three scholars exploring how fatness is represented, constructed, mediated, and contested through digital technologies. This seminar will draw upon three separate bodies of work that converge on the critical politics of the representation, historicisation, and datafication of fat people.

Dr Kirsty Fife researches how fatness and fat people are represented – and misrepresented – through digital archival catalogues, digitised collections, and archival practices. This research identifies both challenges associated with finding, archiving, and interpreting records that represent fat people, and emergent and liberatory alternatives that counter rather than reaffirm patterns of stigmatisation and erasure.

Dr Gemma Gibson traces the history of the body positivity movement in the UK and North America through memoirs, life writing and her own personal recollections. Her research highlights the importance of the movement, alongside its limitations and ultimate political dilution. 

Finally, Dr Aisha Sobey’s work examines how generative AI image models represent body size, identifying how these representations reinforce normative bodily ideals, fail to generate images of fat people or reproduce patterns of stigmatisation of fatness within society. 

Together, the panellists open up a critical conversation about embodiment. They trace histories of stigmatisation, resistance, and fat politics from the archive to our current, data-driven world.

Speakers

• Dr Gemma Gibson, University Teacher in Digital Sociology, School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations, The University of Sheffield

• Dr Aisha Sobey, Acting Curator of Works of Art, Jesus College Cambridge, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge

• Dr Kirsty Fife, Senior Lecturer in Digital Information and Curatorial Practice, Manchester Metropolitan University

Collaborative event between DISC and Media and Digital Culture (MDC).

Location

Grosvenor East (GE) Room 4.05