Staff Profile

I joined the HaSS Faculty Research Training Programme in January 2020, after ten years in the Department of Methodology at the LSE.  I'm a health sociologist by background, with an interest in methodological issues across the social sciences and humanities including digital, arts-based, visual and other sensory methods.  Substantively my work focuses on chronic pain. I was PI of the NCRM/ESRC Methodological Innovations grant Communicating Chronic Pain: Interdisciplinary Strategies for Non-Textual Data (2013-14) and I'm currently writing a book on how visual images are used in relation to pain.

My research has two key strands: developments in qualitative methodologies, particularly visual, arts-based and digital methods, participatory approaches, and research ethics; and a substantive focus on the sociology of pain.

I am available to supervise or co-supervise PhD students working with any of these methods or with interests in chronic/persistent pain, sociology of health, chronic illness, and disability.

Co-Investigator, Co-producing knowledge about the impacts of emergencies/pandemics: Developing remote participatory visual methods using smartphones, Economic and Social Research Council, 2021-2, with Principal Investigator Sonja Marzi, University of Glasgow and Rachel Pain, Newcastle Univcersity.

Principal Investigator, Communicating Chronic Pain: Interdisciplinary Strategies for Non-Textual Data, Economic and Social Research Council via National Centre for Research Methods, May 2013-September 2014, with co-investigators Elena Gonzalez-Polledo, Flora Cornish, Aude Bicquelet, LSE Department of Methodology. www.communicatingchronicpain.org

Principal Investigator, Visual Mapping of Pain and Injury pilot project, Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions Fund, Trinity College Dublin

Co-author and named researcher, Pain and Injury in a Cultural Context:Dancers' Embodied Understandings and Visual Mapping, Arts and Humanities Research Council UK. Principal Investigator: Professor Helen Thomas, London College of Fashion.

 

 

HSS8020: Designing Doctoral Research

I also contribute to HSS8004: Qualitative Methodologies in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and offer one-off sessions in

• Digital Methods
• Academic Time Management
• Time Management on a Budget: Doing a PhD in 40h/week or less

• Articles

  • Tarr J, Cornish F, Gonzalez-Polledo E. Beyond the binaries: reshaping pain communication through arts workshops. Sociology of Health and Illness 2018, 40(3), 577-592.
  • Tarr J, Gonzalez-Polledo E, Cornish F. On liveness: Using arts workshops as a research method. Qualitative Research 2017, 18(1), 36-52.
  • Gonzalez-Polledo E, Tarr J. The thing about pain: The remaking of illness narratives in chronic pain expressions on social media. New Media & Society 2016, 18(8), 1455-1472.

• Edited Book

  • Gonzalez-Polledo EJ, Tarr J, ed. Painscapes: Communicating Chronic Pain. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.