Professor Paula Saukko

PhD (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA), MSc (University of Tampere, Finland)

Pronouns: She/her
  • Research and Innovation Director (Criminology, Sociology & Social Policy)
  • Professor of Social Science and Medicine
Publications
Paula Saukko

Paula draws from medical sociology and media studies, and her research is located between sociology and communication. Her early research critically analysed historical, medical and media discourses on anorexia and how they were lived by anorexic women. In this research she developed an innovative methodology combining the analysis of lived experience and discourses and published both a book on methodology (Doing Research in Cultural Studies, Sage 2003) and a monograph (The Anorexic Self, SUNY Press, 2008).

She then moved onto studying genetic and medical technologies and conducted a series of studies in collaboration with NHS organisations on patient experiences of genetic susceptibility testing for common complex conditions, cardiovascular risk assessment and family history, online direct-to-consumer genetic testing and antibiotic prescribing for older adults. This research has been published through articles in, for example, Social Science and Medicine, Sociology of Health and Illness and Annals of Internal Medicine.

Paula is currently continuing her research on eating disorders. She recently completed a qualitative study on how people with eating disorders experience and negotiate their social media use. This research was covered in BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, About the Girls; she also presented its insights in a workshop for clinicians organised by the UK national eating disorder charity Beat on Social Media and Eating Disorders and worked to co-produce a Beat social media guide - YouTube. Paula is also a co-investigator in a current NIHR-funded Alliance project investigating how to improve relationships between service users and staff in inpatient treatment of eating disorders, where treatment outcomes are often not good. She leads a work-package that translated the findings into a co-produced animation on key dilemmas in staff and service user relationships in inpatient settings. She also has a methodological interest in co-production and arts-based methods, drawing on her long-standing expertise in creative ways to convey lived experience as well as to bring it into conversation with critical and clinical perspectives.

Paula has a first degree in Journalism from the University of Tampere, Finland, and briefly worked as a political reporter. She then moved to the USA to do a PhD in Communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, funded by a Fulbright studentship and a Graduate College studentship. Paula immigrated to the UK in 1998 to take up a lectureship in Communication at the University of Leicester and then moved on to take up the post of Senior Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society at the University of Exeter. She came to Loughborough in 2007.  

Her research has been funded by Department of Health, EPSRC, ESRC, NIHR and Wellcome Trust.

Medical Sociology, Qualitative Methodology, Digital Media, Health, Eating Disorders,

Undergraduate

  • SSA003 Sociological Imagination
  • SSB036 Digital Lives and Society

Postgraduate

  • SSP026 Health Communication

Paula has completed 13 PhD students and welcomes applications from doctoral researchers in areas of (mental) health and/or digital media.

Current Postgraduate Research Students

  • Ma, Shuai. “Social media, local communities and the modernisation of alternative therapies: An ethnographic study of Miao (Hmong) practitioners of traditional medicine” with A Pfoser
  • Suratwala, Tasha. “Neglected experiences of ethnic minority people with eating disorders - A qualitative study of cultures, experiences and access to support” (funded by Loughborough University School studentship) with A Cortvriend
  • Zhou, Xiaobin. “More than just a game: A Bourdieusian analysis of social class and video gaming” with A. Leguina

Recent Postgraduate Research Students