Meredith Jones – Forging a New Career Direction

Graduate News | By Zoë Sofoulis, Adjunct Fellow at ICS

I used to get annoyed when strangers asked “Do you have children?”  Nowadays, I cheerily reply “No, but I’ve had postgraduates.” Postgraduate supervision and subsequent mentoring have allowed me to develop long term relationships with younger people, some of whom become friends and/or colleagues. I take quasi-parental pride in the achievements of my academic progeny, which so often surpass my own, and I hold fervid hopes for their continued success.

So it is with my former supervisee Meredith Jones, a brilliant graduate of the former Centre for Cultural Research, who has recently stepped aside from her highly successful teaching, research and publishing career into an “academia-adjacent” field as a freelance mentor and counsellor to academics and creatives (https://www.meredithjonestherapy.com/).

Meredith Jones is a feminist scholar of the body and the sociocultural aspects of cosmetic surgery, who published her thesis as Skintight soon after graduating in 2006. Her main academic positions were as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at UTS’s Institute for Interactive Media and Learning, and Reader then Professor of Gender and Culture Studies, and Director of the Institute of Communities and Society at Brunel University of London. Beautyscapes, her book on cosmetic surgery tourism (with Ruth Holliday and David Bell) won the 2020 Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize. Other monographs, collections and podcasts cover topics such as the Kardashians, hair, phalluses in contemporary culture, and theories of bodies and media. Along with other former postgrads Ingrid Richardson and Dinesh Wadiwel, she contributed to the recent collection Containment.

Through lived experiences as a postgraduate, research administrator, teaching academic, grant writer, research developer and manager, supervisor and mentor of students and staff, and, importantly, as an empathic co-worker and friend, Meredith knows what it takes to make one’s way through a life entangled in universities—institutional mashups of technocracy and feudalism that make contradictory demands upon the idiosyncratic personalities found there. She now seeks to help others navigate this fraught terrain and find better balances between life and work—not exactly coaching, and not quite therapy, but somewhere in between.

Following declining enrolments at Brunel (and many UK universities), a massive round of voluntary redundancies gave Meredith the springboard she needed to launch into this new role, for which she had already been preparing through studies and clinical supervision at the Manor House Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling, London. Meredith will return to Sydney before long; meanwhile she is available for online counselling and mentorship (in English language) with people beyond the UK. As her proud academic “parent,” I cannot but endorse and recommend her services.