Dr Josie Hamper

Josie Hamper is a research associate working on the TRAVIS project. She joined the School of Geography and the Environment following a postdoctoral research post funded by the Wellcome Trust at Queen Mary University of London. She has a PhD (Human Geography) from Queen Mary University of London, an MSc (Geographies of Health), also from Queen Mary University of London, and an MA (Geography) from the University of St Andrews.

Josie's research focuses on the embodied experiences, knowledge and practices that emerge at the intersection between new technology, health and medicine. Her published work explores how people engage with health and medical technologies, information and imagery, and how digital visualisations (such as fertility monitoring data or images of embryos and foetuses) travel through people's social worlds. Drawing on her qualitative work with fertility patients, Josie has advised the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and contributed to the Women's Health Strategy for England (2021).

Research interests: Digital, visual and reproductive technologies; social studies of health and medicine; self-tracking; the quantified self; feminist geographies of relatedness and the body; reproduction; qualitative research methods; ethnography.

Online visual trust and everyday digital practices: Working with Professor Gillian Rose, Josie's current research forms part of the international CHANSE funded project Trust And Visuality: Everyday digital practices (TRAVIS). This project explores how people experience, build and express trust in news and social media images related to wellbeing and health. Read more about the TRAVIS project.

Biomedical imaging technologies in IVF: Josie's previous postdoctoral work considered how patients undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) encounter new biomedical imaging technologies in the context of fertility treatment. This work employed qualitative interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation to explore how IVF patients make sense of videos that trace the early development of embryos, and how such imagery is involved in reconfiguring understandings of reproductive processes and the human body. Findings have been published in Social & Cultural Geography, Social Science & Medicine and Sociology of Health & Illness. Read more about this project.

Fertility and pregnancy apps as reproductive technologies: Using a range of qualitative and digital methods, Josie's ESRC funded PhD examined women's use of fertility and pregnancy tracking smartphone apps to understand the role that this digital technology plays in how reproduction is negotiated, imagined and practiced in the context of everyday life. She has published this work in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Body & Society and Culture, Health & Sexuality.