Siân Beynon-Jones
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

• PhD (Edinburgh)
• MSc (Edinburgh)
• BSc (Dundee)

Siân Beynon-Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology. She discovered sociology via an undergraduate degree in Molecular Genetics, during which she became frustrated with conversations that positioned proteins as the sole agents of social change. After graduating in 2003, she undertook a taught MSc in Science and Technology studies at the University of Edinburgh, which allowed her to pursue her interest in the sociology of scientific and medical knowledge-making. Following this degree she was awarded an ESRC PhD studentship at Edinburgh (2005-2009). Her doctoral research explored how expertise is constructed by Scottish health professionals who are involved in abortion provision, and considered the implications of this for women who seek to end their pregnancies.

Career

Siân first joined the department in 2009 as a Research Fellow, working with Nik Brown on an EU FP7 project concerning the dynamics of policy-making about xenotransplantation. In 2011 she was awarded a three year Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship at York to develop her research around experiences with abortion provision, focussing in particular on the meaning(s) of ‘time’ and ‘timing’ in this context. Siân took up a permanent post in the department in 2014 as an Anniversary Research Lecturer and has continued to explore temporality, law and reproduction through a range of funded research projects.

Research

Overview

Sian's main research interests are in:

• The sociology of time
• The sociology of health and illness
• Pregnant and post-pregnant embodiment
• Reproductive technologies/healthcare practice
• Feminist STS

Siân’s research focuses on the forms of temporality that we live with, and how available forms of time are produced through technoscientific practices, and their regulation. A key concern in her research is the ways in which time is made and lived in relation to pregnancy and reproduction. This interest has developed through a longstanding engagement with a particular area of medical practice, which intersects explicitly with legal constructions of time, namely, abortion provision in Britain. In addressing health professionals’ and women’s experiences with abortion, Siân's doctoral and post-doctoral research drew attention to the marginalisation of particular kinds of time within the clinic, and in legal and public discourse.

She has built on this work with Emily Grabham at Kent Law School, through the Regulating Time network (funded by the AHRC) which brought together scholars concerned with making time central in the analysis of law and regulation. More recently, these ideas have been developed in conversation with colleagues involved in the A Day at a Time Project (University of Kent), which explores experiences of time during the pandemic.

Alongside these projects, Siân has continued to pursue research concerning reproduction and healthcare, through involvement in an NIHR funded study (2017-2020) which explores decision-making during labour and birth. Currently, she is researching the experiences of bodies after birth.

Publications

Selected publications

• Beynon-Jones, S.M., Martin, D. and Buse, C. (2020) Fixing the future? How architects make time in buildings for later life care. The Sociological Review, 69 (1), 139-155.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. and Grabham, E. (eds.) (2018) Law and Time. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 270, 2019.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2017) Gestating times: Women’s accounts of the temporalities of pregnancies that end in abortion in England. Sociology of Health and Illness, 39 (6), 2017, 832-846.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2017) Untroubling abortion: A discourse analysis of women’s accounts. Feminism and Psychology, 27 (2), 225-242.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2015) Re-visioning ultrasound through women’s accounts of pre-abortion care in England. Gender & Society. 29 (5) 694-715.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2013) ‘We view that as contraceptive failure’: Containing the ‘multiplicity’ of contraception and abortion within Scottish reproductive healthcare. Social Science and Medicine. 80,105-112.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2013) Expecting motherhood? Stratifying reproduction in 21st-century Scottish abortion practice. Sociology. 47 (3) 509-525.
• Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2012) Timing is everything: The demarcation of ‘later’ abortions in Scotland. Social Studies of Science. 42 (1) 53-74.