Meredith Rachael Jones (born 1965) is an Australian cultural theorist, currently employed at Brunel University London as Professor in Arts and Humanities, and as the director of its Institute of Communities and Society.
Education and academic career
Meredith Rachael Jones was born in 1965. She took a pass degree in Arts from the University of Melbourne, and upgraded this to a first-class honours degree in gender studies under Elspeth Probyn at the University of Sydney in 1998. Taking a position at the University of Technology, Sydney teaching media studies, Jones earned a Graduate Diploma in Communications and began studying for her doctorate. Her PhD project was supervised by Zoë Sofoulis in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney and was completed in 2006. Parts of her doctoral work were published in the academic journals Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, and Social Semiotics, and contributed to her first book. Together with her supervisor, Jones contributed a chapter to the book The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, examining the work of Stelarc and Orlan.
In 2015, Jones became a Reader in gender and media studies, as well as the Director of the Research Centre for Global Lives, in the College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences at Brunel University London. In 2022 she became full Professor and the inaugural Director of the Institute of Communities and Society.
Academic research
Jones describes her research as occurring "at the intersections of media theory, gender studies, and cultural studies." Her research has explored cosmetic surgery and the phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism, popular culture through the lens of feminist theory, and empowerment and visualisation of bodies. Her PhD thesis was titled Makeover Culture: Landscapes of Cosmetic Surgery Language and explored surgical makeovers as a cultural phenomenon. Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery, her first book, was published in 2008. It "argues that cosmetic surgery is the most provocative and controversial aspect of a new 'makeover culture'" with direct connections to reality television programs that "demonstrate that 'fixing' the body is a way to improve lifestyle and uncover true identity", citing examples including 10 Years Younger (United States and United Kingdom versions) and Extreme Makeover.
Body visualisation / empowerment
Jones has researched how human bodies are portrayed, how we visualise our own bodies, and how these are culturally influenced; she explored this topic in Skintight. She has examined the cultural impact of the availability of graphics-editing software such as Photoshop, which have problematised the ideal of photography as a means to capture an accurate and authentic representation of reality. Digital manipulation of images is now so frequent as to have become "an integral part of the performance of public life" and Jones argues that we now inhabit "media-bodies". Jones introduced this term in an earlier study examining the expansion of reality television coverage to including cosmetic surgery. Camille Nurka picked up the term in her book Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery, noting that "cosmetic surgery can approximate the effect of digital airbrushing to make us look less disappointingly human and more like ageless plastic". Nurka linked the concept to objectification theory, developed by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts and referring to "the experience of being treated as a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominantly for its use to (or consmuption by) others," and used it as a basis for an extended discussion of self-objectification.
