Searching for Fatness In and Through Digital Technologies

This panel brings together three scholars exploring how fatness is represented, constructed, mediated, and contested through digital technologies. This seminar will draw upon three separate bodies of work that converge on the critical politics of the representation, historicisation, and datafication of fat people.

Dr Kirsty Fife researches how fatness and fat people are represented – and misrepresented – through digital archival catalogues, digitised collections, and archival practices. This research identifies both challenges associated with finding, archiving, and interpreting records that represent fat people, and emergent and liberatory alternatives that counter rather than reaffirm patterns of stigmatisation and erasure.

Dr Gemma Gibson traces the history of the body positivity movement in the UK and North America through memoirs, life writing and her own personal recollections. Her research highlights the importance of the movement, alongside its limitations and ultimate political dilution.

Finally, Dr Aisha Sobey’s work examines how generative AI image models represent body size, identifying how these representations reinforce normative bodily ideals, fail to generate images of fat people or reproduce patterns of stigmatisation of fatness within society.

Together, the panellists open up a critical conversation about embodiment. They trace histories of stigmatisation, resistance, and fat politics from the archive to our current, data-driven world.

Dr Gemma Gibson

Teaching Associate in Sociology

School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations

The University of Sheffield

Dr Aisha Sobey

Acting Curator of Works of Art, Jesus College Cambridge

Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

University of Cambridge

Dr Kirsty Fife

Senior Lecturer in Digital Information and Curatorial Practice

Manchester Metropolitan University

Collaborative event between DISC and Media and Digital Culture (MDC).

Grosvenor East Building, Room 4.05 at Manchester Metropolitan University. The venue is fully step-free and accessible for all visitors.

Parking is available nearby at the University’s Booth Street West car park and the Circle Square multi-storey. Limited on-street pay-and-display bays operate on Grosvenor Street from 8 am–8 pm.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Grosvenor East Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, Arts and Humanities Building, Cavendish St, Manchester, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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