Dr Hester Hockin-Boyers

Overview

Hester joined the Department of Sociology and Criminology in 2025 following an Assistant Professorship at Durham University (UK) and a Lecturship at Erasmus University (Netherlands). 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 (Hockin-Boyers et al, 2025). 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. 

 

Research Interests

• New Media
• Digital health cultures
• Exercise and health
• Eating disorders  
• Gender 

PhD Supervision

If you are interested in pursuing postgraduate research in any of these areas, please email Hester directly at hester.hockin-boyers@city.ac.uk

Qualifications

• PhD Sociology, Durham University, United Kingdom, September 2017 - January 2022
• MPhil Gender Studies, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, September 2015 - July 2016
• BSc Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, September 2012 - July 2015

Employment

• Senior Lecturer, City, University of London, United Kingdom, September 2025 - present
• Assistant Professor, Durham University, United Kingdom, September 2022 - August 2025
• Lecturer, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, December 2021 - August 2022

Publications by category