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Staff Profile

Dr Jen Tarr

Senior Lecturer in Social Science Research Methods

  • Email: jen.tarr@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: Researcher Education and Development
    School X
    Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
    9.13 Henry Daysh Building
    Newcastle University, NE1 7RU
Background

I joined HaSS Researcher Education and Development in January 2020, after ten years in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. I've been Director or Co-Director of RED since 2021. I'm a health sociologist by background, with an interest in methodological issues across the social sciences and humanities including research ethics and novel 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. I am particularly interested in the turn to neuroscience in pain research and the role that neuroimaging has played in producing new understandings of pain.


Having worked in multi- and interdisciplinary contexts for much of my career, I am particularly interested in the points of contact between the social sciences and humanities, arts, health and medicine. Broadly speaking, my research takes a feminist science and technology studies lens, with a focus on critical understandings of the limits of any given methodological approach, including who it may serve to silence or speak for.


My PhD, from Goldsmiths University of London, focused on the emergence of the concept of 'body wisdom' in alternative training techniques such as Pilates and the Alexander Technique. I have training in contemporary dance and after my PhD I was co-author and Research Associate on a large scale qualitative study funded by the AHRC, using a body scanning and mapping process to explore dancers' experiences and understandings of pain and injury. The striking difficulty many people had in explaining what pain was, together with the challenge of interpreting conflicting findings of visual, interview and questionnaire methods, became the foundation of my current research programme.



Research

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 University.


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.






 

 

Teaching

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



Publications