Research Interests
Sharon is primarily interested in visual culture and cultural and social geographies of race and ethnicity. . Her work is influenced by Post-structuralist, Post-colonial and Feminist theory. Sharon’s principal research interests lie in the often hidden social geographies of difference, marginalisation and belonging. Her recently completed PhD offered a critical study of televisual archives, providing an interrogation of the construction and transmission of discourses of ’race’ and ’ethnicity’ and their relations to ’place’ and ’Irishness’ on Ireland’s national broadcasting channel.
For the future, Sharon intends to build on the work applied to her PhD study to further assess issues related to the power of the media to script and disseminate various narratives that impact upon the social construction of the most forgotten in society. She has acquired a particular interest in the ways in which media elites produce and regulate knowledge in particularly nuanced ways, allowing for the production and legitimisation of specific understandings in relation to a variety of social geographies, most especially issues focused on cultural difference and the discourses surrounding illegal transnational flows.
Completed Ph.D
Sharon’s PhD thesis discusses how an elite current affairs television forum mobilises certain markers of identity with respect to ethnic minority groups in Ireland. Situated within the field of media geographies, the research draws on theories of communication, utilising the concepts of framing and agenda setting to assess the significance of discursive power in the social construction of identity. The study aims to contribute to current geographical research, which underlines the influence of the visual on the dispersal of geographic knowledges and in this case, on the constitution of ethnic identities. This research draws on a range of evidence including the textual content of principal Irish current affairs programmes, on-line discussion boards, and surveys with audiences and members of ethnic minority groups. Content analysis and critical discourse analysis are applied to analyse the structure and substance of the programme contents, with discourse analysis as the main method applied in the case of discussion board and survey data. This critical interpretation of the evidence reveals the changing nature of elite discourses, leading in turn to the social (re)production of ethnic minority identities in an Irish context. It highlights how state-sponsored current affairs television provides a nationally screened space for the reinforcement of certain ethnic prejudices, with the problematisation of ethnic minorities within this national medium being shown to have a significant effect upon how they are perceived within the wider national consciousness. Evidence from ethnic minority organisations also reveals the sense of concern felt by these groups about the impact of such televised narratives on a wider audience, suggesting that the position of power held by the national media is open to being misused and misappropriated. Her thesis concludes by reflecting upon the influential position of the national media in a potential context of covert prejudice towards ethnic minorities in Ireland.
| 
Leagan Gaeilge
Text Version
Display: Zoom
(-)
(+)
View ( Normal High contrast )
Printer Friendly
A to Z
Sitemap
yahoo.co.uk