Sarah is a PhD candidate in the Social and Cultural Analysis programme under the supervision of Kregg Hetherington.

She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Balliol College, Oxford, and an MSc in Sustainable Development from the University of Sussex. Additionally Sarah has extensive experience working in communications and advertising having worked with the world’s largest tech, auto and FMCG clients during her time working at creative and digital agencies, and at Google. During her time at Google, Sarah was principally focused on the YouTube ecosystem, facilitating workshops for the world’s biggest advertisers to show them how best to reach their audiences via video.

With her PhD research, Sarah is focused on Montreal’s river surfing community. The community is currently campaigning to have a new, artificial surf break built in the Saint Lawrence as it flows through Montreal. This action has the potential to disrupt the material and social conditions in which the community, and others, engage with the water and the liminal space. Her research examines how the wave, as technical infrastructure, will rearticulate relationships between the land, water and people. Methodologically, Sarah is working through concepts of embodiment and of immersion, with a focus on how the thinking, feeling, and doing ‘soma’ is immersed in the physical landscape of the research and in the water itself.

Sarah is the communications coordinator for Concordia’s Ethnography Lab and a member of its Waterways working group, which was recently accepted as a partner within the River Cities Network.