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 pregnancy through a range of funded research projects. She has held a number of roles within the department including Chair of the Board of Examiners and Chair of the Board of Studies.

Departmental roles

Chair of the Board of Studies

Research

Overview

Sian's main research interests are in:

• Sociology of reproduction
• Pregnant and post-pregnant embodiment
• Time and temporalities
• Feminist Science and Technology Studies
• Medical Sociology

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 care for post-birth bodies.

Sian has supervised a number of doctoral projects to completion and is interested in supervising doctoral students working on issues related to the postnatal period, as well as the sociology of reproduction and/or time more broadly.

Publications

Selected publications

• Beynon-Jones, S.M. and Anand, A. (2025) Thinking with Post-Birth Bodies: Articulating sociological care for bodies that function differently after birth. Sociology of Health and Illness. 47 (4), 
• Cummings, J., and Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2025) Time and Reproduction, Sex & Sexualities, 1 (1).
• Beynon-Jones, S.M. and Jackson, C. (2024) Talking cervixes: How times materialise during the first stage of labour. Socioogy of Health and Illness. 46 (5) 789-1061.
• Beynon-Jones, S.M., Martin, D. Buse, C., Nettleton, S., and Annandale, E. (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. (2012) Timing is everything: The demarcation of ‘later’ abortions in Scotland. Social Studies of Science. 42 (1), 53-74.

Teaching

Other teaching

Sian draws on her research concerning reproduction, time, embodiment and healthcare in teaching on undergraduate modules - Gender, Sexuality and Inequalities (second year) and Morbidity, Culture and Corpses (third year). She also teaches the Masters module Introduction to Qualitative Methods and Data Analysis, as well as supervising both undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations.