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Dr Sarah Bowman

Assistant Professor

Department: Northumbria School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries

Sarah has over 25 years working in organisational communications in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors primarily in London.  She has held a variety of senior positions in the UK and in Europe before entering academia where she obtained her PhD in corporate communications. Her formative academic career was at the University of the Arts, London before moving to Northumbria in 2017.  Sarah is rhizomatic and ecological in her research interests and is drawn to overlapping and interconnected themes, in particular how stakeholders, organisations, professions and communities navigate change. She uses a range of conceptual frameworks to explore phenomena from sense-making and sense-giving, to various sociological theories, as well as drawing on and in rhetorical and visual communications.

Sarah Bowman

Sarah has over 25 years working in organisational communications in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.  Her interests focus on how to bring about, understand, manage, and implement change.  Areas of expertise include:

  • organisational communications drawing on a range of sociological theories from the work of Bourdieu, Habermas, Bauman, Goffman, Foucault and more recently a range of feminist theories (in particular, radical feminism)
  • building belonging, community, and identification both inside and outside organisations drawing on the theoretical lens of sense-making and sense-giving 
  • exploring the sociology and evolution of the professions in an age of liquid modernity, with a specific interest in 'discourse work' such as public relations, public affairs, advocacy, and activism and is becoming increasingly drawn to metamodernism to reflect the reality of working in complexity
  • radical pedagogy to support graduates and those in the professions to build the sensibilities to navigate the precarity and liminality prevalent in late modernity
  • the role of the media in shaping and reflecting cultural norms

Ke Xue The Development of Short Video User-Interactive Digital Media from UGC to PGC Start Date: 04/12/2023

  • Philosophy PhD August 04 2017
  • Senior Fellow Higher Education Academy SFHEA 2021


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