Network Members
If you would like to become a member, or would like any further information, please contact postdigitalintimacies.fah@coventry.ac.uk
Dr Adrienne Evans
Dr Adrienne Evans is Reader for Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. Her research focuses on accounts of intimacy in the context of a postfeminist sensibility. In her work, she explores ways in which gender organises personal, social, intimate and cultural relationships, as well as their manifestations in media culture. She has published extensively on these topics and is the author of, among others, Technologies of Sexiness (OUP, 2014) and Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018).
Dr Jessica Ringrose
Dr Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education and co-director of the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity. Her research focuses on youth digital intimacies and sexual cultures, and innovative feminist qualitative, participatory and impactful research methodologies. Recent books include Feminist Posthumanisms, New Materialisms and Education (Routledge, 2018) and Digital Feminist Activism (Oxford University Press, 2019), and is the 2020 Recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award (USA), which recognizes her commitment to advocacy work. She founded the Feminist Educational Engagement Lab (FEEL) and co-coordinates PhEmaterialism.
Alison Winch
Alison’s books include Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (2013) and The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power (2021, co-authored with Ben Little). She has co-edited special issues on Intergenerational Feminisms for Feminist Media Studies, Mediated Intimacies for Journal of Gender Studies, and Transnational Feminisms and Neoliberalism for Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. She is currently working on a project called ‘The Promotional Household’ which looks at how racialised patriarchy is reinforced, struggled over, and resisted in sites of datafication, online branding, and digitised intimacies.
Dr Amber Martin Woodhead
Dr Amber Martin Woodhead is a lecturer in Human Geography at Coventry University. She has overarching research focus on feminist geography, cultural economy approaches and geographies of consumption. Her ongoing research concerns sustainable consumption and minimalism, ethical and sustainable fashion and gender and material embodiment. She has conducted research on the geographies of the sex retail industry, post-feminism and representations of the female body and is currently researching minimalism and its potential for sustainable (non)consumption. More projects here and here
Dr Amy Shields Dobson
Dr Amy Shields Dobson is a Lecturer in Digital and Social Media at Curtin University. Her work focuses on youth, social media, and gendered subjectivities. She is the author of Postfeminist Digital Cultures (2015), and editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (2018) with Brady Robards & Nicholas Carah, both published by Palgrave. Over the last decade her work has advanced knowledge about youth social media use by highlighting the complexity of digital self-representation and the co-constitution of youth self-representational practices, and commercial digital media and platform imperatives. Her recent projects include research into cyber-safety and sexting education, female genital cosmetic surgery, and youth nightlife cultures and alcohol branding on social media.
Bronwyn Carlson
Bronwyn Carlson is a Professor and Head of Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, Australia. She is a self-proclaimed Indigenous futurist and is interested in Indigenous engagements with digital technologies. She is widely published on the topic of Indigenous cultural, social, intimate, and political engagements on social media including her publication, Love and hate at the cultural interface: Indigenous Australians and dating apps (2019); co-editing and contributing to two special issues; the Australasian Journal of Information Systems (2017) on 'Indigenous Activism on Social Media’ and Media International Australia (2018) on “Indigenous Innovation on Social Media and an edited volume, (2021)” Bronwyn is also the founding and managing editor of the Journal of Global Indigeneity.
Bárbara Berger
Bárbara Berger is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, UCL. Her research focuses on flirting among teens in Chile, theorizing flirting as the intra-production of intimacy between human and non-human elements within an assemblage. Chile is a particularly interesting context for this research because of the strong politically engaged feminist movements and protests, so I am also looking at potential feminist affects within flirting-assemblages.
Carolina Bandinelli
Carolina Bandinelli is an Assistant Professor in Media and Creative Industries at the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on emerging forms of subjectivity and sociality in digital cultures, which she investigates combining ethnographic methods with the analysis of symbolic and affective experiences. She is author of a number of contributions on the organisation and significance of work in neoliberal creative industries. Now her research agenda finally tackles the question that has captured her since she was a child: i.e. ‘What is Love?!’. As a media scholar, she decided to approach the matter by looking at how digital technologies affect the ways in which we think and experience love. In 2021, she published an article on dating apps’ libidinal economies in the journal of Psychoanalysis Culture and Society.
Chloé Locatelli
Chloé Locatelli is a PhD candidate in the Digital Humanities department at King’s College London. Her research looks at constructions of femininity in sextech and their posthuman potential. She is interested in sextech, ‘sex robots’, affinity with digital characters and other places where sex, intimacy and digital technologies meet – topics she also covers as a contributor to Futureofsex.net. Chloé has also produced several academic publications. Her latest contribution for Springer’s Maschinenliebe (2021), co-authored with Dr Kate Devlin, explores the emphasis on intimacy in sex robot marketing.
Prof Crystal Abidin
A/Prof Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, especially internet celebrity, influencer cultures, and social media pop cultures in the Asia Pacific region. She has published over 60 articles/chapters and 5 books. Crystal's internationally acclaimed research has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, Pacific Standard Top 30 Thinkers Under 30, and the ABC Top 5 Humanities Fellowship. She is Principal Research Fellow and ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies at Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com
Darren Gary Berkland
Darren Gary Berkland is a South African PhD candidate and Digital Media Lecturer at Coventry University, UK. Their research is conducted under CU’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures and focuses on the conditioning of gestures through the possible arrangements and organisations provided by increasingly ubiquitous postdigital assemblages. In particular, Berkland’s PhD thesis examines the postdigital assembling of selfies and the volume of relationships emerging between gesture and perception through affect. They’re also super worried about the abyss of abstractions within computing.
Dr. Debbie Ging
Dr. Debbie Ging is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. Her research is concerned primarily with digital gender politics, in particular the manosphere and online misogyny. Together with Prof. Eugenia Siapera, she has co-edited a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on Online Misogyny (2018) and an edited collection entitled Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Debbie is a member of the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre and of the Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) in Dublin City University.
Professor Deborah Lupton
Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney, working in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre and leading the Vitalities Lab. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology and media and cultural studies. Lupton is Leader of the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and holds an Honorary Doctor of Social Science degree awarded by the University of Copenhagen.
Debra Ferreday
Debra Ferreday is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University. She works at the intersection of feminism, queer theory, and cultural studies with a strong interest in the psychic and affective life of gendered, raced, and ableist power structures. Her work explores the mediated and cultural representation of mental illness, trauma, and violence, with a particular focus on femininity. Books and special issues include Online Belongings (2009), Hope and Feminist Theory (2011), Fame-inism (2017), and Queer Representation in Contemporary Popular Television (forthcoming).
Dr Elisa García-Mingo
Dr. Elisa García-Mingo is lecturer at the Department of Sociology: Methods and Theory at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her research focuses on rape culture, digital toxic cultures and feminist cyberactivism. She is also interested in qualitative inquiry and digital social research. She has published work in ‘Comparative Sociology’, ‘Feminist Media Studies’ and “Gender, Work and Organizations”. She leads a research project about online masculinities, sexual violence and the local Spanish manosphere.
Emily Setty
I am a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey interested in young people’s experiences of sexualised digital media. I examine the sociocultural context in which risk and harm is perceived and unfolds, and how to address this in critically-informed education and interventions. Current projects include an investigation of the impact of lockdown on young people’s digital sexual cultures; experiences of sex education among young people involved in harmful online sexual behaviours; and the co-production of educational resources to tackle social shaming and bystander harms among young people.
Idil Cambazoglu
Idil Cambazoglu is a PhD candidate at UCL, IOE. She examines elite-school boys’ performances of masculinit(ies) in Turkey. Idil looks at specific sets of gendered behaviors, codes, dispositions, understandings and tastes acquired and incorporated through elite-schooling and how these are socially constructed and shaped in relation to and against various gender orders, hegemonies, and trends existing at regional, global, and online/offline levels and spaces. Her research interests are gender/sex and sexualities, masculinit(ies), boys and girls in education, elite-schools and schooling. She holds a Masters in sociology (of gender, sexuality and politics) from EHESS-Paris.
Jamie Hakim
Jamie Hakim is a lecturer in media studies at the University of East Anglia. His research interests lie at the intersection of digital cultures, intimacy, embodiment and care. His book Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2019. He is principle investigator on the ESRC funded ‘Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy’, which is partnered with sexual health organisations the Terrence Higgins Trust, London Friend and Waverley Care (uea.ac.uk/digital-intimacies). He’s also co-investigator on the AHRC funded ‘Public Health Messaging during the COVID Pandemic: Dating App Usage and Sexual Wellbeing among Men Who have Sex with Men’. As part of the Care Collective, he has co-authored The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence published by Verso.
Jeannine Teichert
Jeannine Teichert is currently a research associate and PhD student at the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University, Germany. Her research areas include interpersonal communication, mediated intimacy, migration, and media education. Jeannine's PhD research looks at the communicative negotiation of close friendships against the background of mediatization processes. Applying various qualitative research methods, her research projects in the field of migration studies explore migrants' identity negotiations and the reproduction of digital intimacies via communication media across geographical distances.
Jiali Fan
Jiali Fan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research examines how digital food influencers shape public understandings of food, health and wellness and how political-economies of media production and algorithm design confine the presentation of these influencers. She is particularly interested in digital food cultures, women’s experiences of eating, platform affordances and mediated intimacy. She has also done research on gendered migration in Asia-Pacific.
Jilly Boyce Kay
Jilly Boyce Kay is a lecturer in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester. She is author of Gender, Media and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech (Palgrave 2020) and has published widely on feminism and media. She has particular interests in women's anger, desire and abjection in contemporary media culture, and is the author of the forthcoming chapter 'Abject desires in the age of anger: incels, femcels and the gender politics of unf*ckability'. She is currently writing about 'red pill' logics in women's online communities. She is co-convenor of the Media and Gender research group.
Kaitlyn Regehr
Kaitlyn Regehr is a Senior Lecturer in media and digital culture at the University of Kent. Her research interests include gender, diversity and digital culture, and involve high impact forms of dissemination through engagement with government bodies and the film and media industry. She is invested in entwining theory and practice, inclusive of documentary and video ethnography and has created content for the BBC and the Guardian. Her research uses film-based practices both in methodological design and in subsequent research outputs, and include: Mayor of London funded project “The Women We See: Experiences of Gender and Diversity in London's Public Advertising” (with Professor Jessica Ringrose); Discovery Network funded documentary “Video Evidence: Sexual Violence, Trauma and Technology”; Kent University Impact funded , “Gender, Social Media and Image Based Sexual Abuse” (with Professor Jessica Ringrose); and, in collaboration with Scotland Yard, a study of the “Incel” community (which includes a documentary with BBC3 and an upcoming monograph).
Professor Kaitlynn Mendes
Kaitlynn Mendes is Professor of Gender, Media and Sociology at the University of Leicester, UK. She has written widely around representations of feminism in the media, and feminists’ use of social media to challenge rape culture. This includes the everyday experiences of using digital technologies to speak about feminist issues. As one of the leading scholars on #MeToo and other relevant digital feminist campaigns, she has recently been interested in issues of online sexual harassment in school settings and translating her research findings to impactful resources for schools and young people. More projects: see here.
Kath Albury
Kath Albury is Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Australia. She co-leads the Digital Inclusion Program in Swinburne's Social Innovation Research Institute (SIRI) and is an Associate Investigator in the Swinburne Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Her research investigates practices of digital self-representation, and the role of user-generated media (including social networking platforms) in young people’s formal and informal sexual learning, safety and wellbeing. Current projects include an Australian eSafety Commission-funded partnership with the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, aimed at preventing technology-based abuse.
Katrin Tiidenberg
Katrin Tiidenberg (Professor of Participatory Culture at Tallinn University) is a social media, sexualities and visual cultures researcher from Estonia. Her recent books include "Selfies, why we love (and hate) them" (2018), “Sex and Social Media” (2020, with Emily van der Nagel) and the curated collection “Metaphors of the internet” (2020, with Annette Markham). Kat serves on the Executive Board of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) and is currently working on two research projects - Rethinking sexuality with Jenny Sunden and Susanna Paasonen and DigiGen. More info at katrin-tiidenberg.com.
Dr. Lindsay Balfour
Dr. Lindsay Balfour is Assistant Professor if Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Her research draws on critical theories of hospitality, and concerns the role of digital and artificial intelligence in everyday life. She is interested in exploring the android body in popular culture, gendered violence in the digital domestic, and feminist analyses of surveillance capitalism and embodied computing including the concept of “tracking” through wearables, implantibles, and ingestibles.
Luc Cousineau
Luc Cousineau studies Men’s Rights and Red Pill communities on reddit, and it is as fun as it sounds. Interrogating discourses of masculinities and community connection in these men’s groups, Luc’s work examines how manosphere groups position on the political right, engage with Western gendered traditionalisms, but also contrast with one another in important ways. He is currently working on an assemblage and digital ethnography theory-methods for experienced researchers new to digital research.
Dr Marcus Maloney
Dr Marcus Maloney is Lecturer in Sociology and Research Associate in Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Marcus's research focuses on video game narratives, cultures, and communities; the performance of masculinity in digital spaces; and postdigital socialities. He has published widely in these areas, including articles in Cultural Sociology, New Media and Society and Games and Culture. His most recent book is Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit's r/gaming Community (Palgrave, 2019).
Mel Jordan
Mel Jordan is an artist and founding member of the Partisan Social Club. She is Professor of Art & the Public Sphere, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Jordan’s research is concerned with the potential of art as a political tool through its role as a form of opinion formation in the public domain. She is founding editor of Art and the Public Sphere Journal (2009). Exhibitions include the Istanbul Biennial and the Liverpool Biennial as well as BAK, Utrecht, Wysing Arts, Cambridge, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, the ICA London, Centro Cultural, Montehermoso, Vitoria, Spain.
Miriam De Rosa
Miriam De Rosa researches and teaches film and media theories as well as visual cultures and artists’ cinema at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, where she is Associate Professor in film and media. Her recent publications include: Dwelling with moving images (in Chateau and Moure, AUP 2020), Film & Domestic Space (EUP, 2020), Gesture (2019). Miriam also serves as the general coordinator of the International Master in Cinema Studies (IMACS), sits in the Steering Committee of NECS and is active as an independent film curator. Her last curatorial project is entitled Desktop Cinema (2017-ongoing).
Dr Rikke Amundsen
Dr Rikke Amundsen is an Associate Lecturer in Social Media and Society at the University of York. Rikke’s research is concerned with the influence of digital mediation on interpersonal relations and, more specifically, on practices and perceptions of intimacy. Her research on adult women’s experiences of sexting has so far resulted in journal articles and book chapters on the dynamics of risk, trust and intimacy in the digital exchange of private sexual imagery. Rikke’s research on digitally mediated risk, trust and intimacy has also led to the development of a particular research interest in the relation between trust and technology.
Rikke Andreassen
[Photo by Thomas Cato]
Rikke Andreassen is a professor at the Department of Arts and Communication, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work is interdisciplinary with a strong focus on gender, sexuality, race and history. Empirically, she researches various types of media and technologies in order to throw light on how they challenge or reinforce norms, power structures and processes of inclusion/exclusion. She is the author of Mediated Kinship: Gender, Race and Sexuality in Donor Families (Routledge, 2018) and editor of Mediated Intimacies. Connectivities, Relationalities and Proximities (Routledge, 2018). She co-leads the Nordic research network ‘Datafication, Data Inequalities and Data Justice’ (with Anne Kaun and Kaarina Nikunen). She is a project partner in Scandinavian Border Crossings.
Róisín Ryan-Flood
Róisín Ryan-Flood is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC) at the University of Essex. Her research interests include gender, sexuality and critical epistemologies. She is the author of Lesbian Motherhood: Gender, Families and Sexual Citizenship (Palgrave, 2009) and co-editor of Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process (Routledge, 2010) and Transnationalising Reproduction: Third Party Conception in a Globalised World (Routledge, 2018). Since 2012, she has been co-editor of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society (Sage). She is currently writing a book about gender and intimacy in the digital era.
Dr Rosie Findlay
Dr Rosie Findlay is Course Leader of MA Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion, UAL and Reviews and Open Space Editor of International Journal of Fashion Studies. Her research centres on fashion media and communication, particularly digital fashion cultures. Current projects include co-editing Insights on Fashion Journalism (Routledge, 2022); and examining the role fashion blogs played in the careers of a number of prominent fashion media practitioners. Her first book, Personal Style Blogs: Appearances that Fascinate (Intellect, 2017) focused on the history and development of style blogs. See rosiefindlay.com for more about her work.
Sarah Cefai
Sarah Cefai is Lecturer in Gender, Media and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works in feminist cultural studies and cultural theory to examine formative questions of feminist theory and culture, with a particular interest in the centrality of sexuality and the mediation of intimacy. Recent publications include ‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory’ in The Future of Media (Goldsmiths Press/MIT, 2022) and ‘Feminist Aesthetics of Resistance’ in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current research concerns the aesthetics of obligation as a new paradigm for feminist cultural analysis.
Sarah Riley
Sarah Riley is a Professor in Critical Health Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand. Located in psychology, she also draws on sociology, cultural and media studies to explore the psychological impact of neoliberalism, addressing questions of gender, embodiment, health and citizenship. She has been funded by the EU, ESRC, EPSRC, British Academy, and Canadian Social Sciences and Research Council. Co-authored books include Critical Bodies (Palgrave, 2008), Technologies of Sexiness (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Postfeminism & Health (Routledge, 2018).
Dr Sarah Kate Merry
Dr Sarah Kate Merry is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Sarah’s background is in information studies, and her research interests include the impact of the Internet on personal relationships, non-participation in online communities, and social capital. Her current work focuses on gender representation in radio drama, non-consuming media fans, and how marginalised individuals use online spaces. Her academic career peaked when she was royally done over by the Mail on Sunday. She will have her revenge...
Dra Silvia Diaz-Fernandez
Dra Silvia Diaz-Fernandez is a visiting researcher at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her current research looks at online masculinities, feminist digital ethnography and the local Spanish manosphere. In her past work, she developed a feminist affective methodology through exploring the reproduction of lad culture within the context of British Higher Education. She has published work in ‘Qualitative Inquiry’ and ‘Gender Place and Culture’.
Susanna Paasonen
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku and PI of the research consortium “Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture” (2019-2025) funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland. She is most recently author of Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, MIT Press 2019), Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism (with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer, and Clarissa Smith, Routledge 2020), Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Jenny Sundén, MITP 2020) and Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP 2021), and serves on the editorial boards of e.g. New Media & Society, Social Media & Society and International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Stacey Moon
Stacey Moon-Tracy is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. Her research focuses on examining the narratives of female-identifying ITU Nurse’s and what this reveals about how ITU nurses relate to their role and of the relationships within their role and whether this has been affected by their lived experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the UK. This will be explored further through the co-creation of a stage play and reflections on the process and its impact on wellbeing.
Tanya Horeck
Tanya Horeck is an Associate Professor in Film, Media & Culture at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK. She writes on binge-watching, celebrity culture, crime, violence, internet memes, social justice, and social media platforms, and is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. Her current research projects include an AHRC funded study on online sexual risks for young people during Covid-19, and a British academy funded study on the rise of consent culture, television, and intimacy coordination.
Tina Kendall
Tina Kendall is Associate Professor of Film & Media at Anglia Ruskin University. She has published in a range of journals, including New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory and Politics, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, and Journal of Cinema & Media Studies. Her current project, Entertained-or-Else: Boredom and the Affective Technologies of #LockdownLife analyses boredom and networked media, with a focus on the context of the Coronavirus crisis.
Xumeng Xie
Xumeng Xie is a doctoral student based at the Institute of Education, University College London. Combining an online tracking study with individual interviews and social media diaries, my PhD project explores how Chinese young women understand, experience and learn about feminism and gender across offline and online spaces. More specifically, I look into how Chinese young women respond to gendered discourses and challenge cultural and societal norms such as filial piety. I am particularly interested in the affective-discursive aspects of their digital feminist practices and how social media has enabled new forms of connections, networks and activism.
Zixi Zuo
Zixi Zuo is a PhD candidate in the c, UK. Her research interest includes youth culture, sexuality education, digital intimacy, intersectionality, and online activism. Using ethnographic approaches, her PhD research investigates gendered and sexual subjectivities on campuses and young people's intimate relationships. The purpose of the research is to rethink the normative discourses and everyday practices of young people to understand the operations of heteronormativity across institutions and young people's life courses. Zixi has also actively engaged in podcast productions that advocate for sexual autonomy and pleasure with other Chinese feminists.
Dr Izzy Fox
Dr Izzy Fox is a postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland working on the AHRC and IRC-funded project, Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities, a collaboration between Maynooth University, Sussex University and Technological University, Dublin. The project aims to embed intersectional feminist methodologies in the Digital Humanities. She completed her PhD in 2020 on fourth wave digital feminist activism, placing contemporary feminism in Ireland in the international, historical and digital contexts. Her thesis had a particular focus on hegemonic feminisms, surveillant technologies and intersectional feminist critiques and campaigns.
Marjo Kolehmainen
Dr. Marjo Kolehmainen is a TIAS fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku (Finland). Her research project 'Networked Care: Explorations of Intimacy in Digital Therapy' (NetCare) explores digital healthcare practices, aiming at producing novel insights into how human well-being is co-constituted with technological infrastructures. By exploring digital therapy and counselling in Finland, NetCare provides novel knowledge of such forms of care whose implementation is very much dependent on the generation of intimacy – experiences of trust, proximity, confidentiality and security. Further, the project brings together insights from feminist new materialisms, science and technology studies and psychosocial studies in order to trace the ways in which intimacy is being made of and with multiple entangled materialities. Kolehmainen has authored publications in various journals and is a co-editor of two volumes: Affective Intimacies (Manchester University Press, 2022) and Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships (Routledge, 2018).
Kate Gilchrist
Dr Kate Gilchrist is a Lecturer in Digital Media (Critical Studies) at The Institute of Education, UCL, a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Lincoln, and a Visiting Fellow/Guest Teacher at LSE. Her research focuses on how feminine subjectivity is constructed through discourses of intimate life at and between the individual psychic and cultural level, drawing upon postfeminist and psychosocial theory. She investigates this by combining discursive analysis of cultural representations and lived experience. Her interests include feminine subjectivity, popular and digital culture, mediated understandings of intimate life, digital intimate publics, alternative relationship practices and singlehood. She has published in Sexualities journal, on processes of silencing of single women in contemporary UK society, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies on popular cultural representations of singlehood.
Riki Thompson
Riki Thompson is Associate Professor of Digital Rhetoric & Writing Studies at University of Washington Tacoma. Her scholarship examines the intersections of discourse, technology, identity, and interpersonal connectivity. Riki’s favorite tools for exploring postdigital intimacies and digital culture in relation to sexuality, gender, and digital dating contexts are digital discourse methods including multimodal critical discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches. Her scholarship has contributed to advancing the field of digital discourse studies with pieces in Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis and The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities. Riki is also a public scholar who has written for and conducted interviews with venues such as Salon, Vox, The Conversation, and Global Dating Insights Podcast. She is a recognized SHESource expert with the Women’s Media Center. Learn more at rikithompson.com
Zoe Hurley
Zoe Hurley (PhD) is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and an assistant professor in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies, at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her work focuses on semiotics, intersectional feminism(s), power and visual communication. She is the President of the Gulf Association of Semiotic Studies, which is an associate member of the International Association of Semiotic Studies. She has published articles in leading academic journals including New Media & Society; Feminist Media Studies; Social Media + Society; Information Communication & Society; Postdigital Science and Education; and Visual Communication, in addition to several chapters, commentaries and blogs on semiotics. Her upcoming monograph - Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition - expands a semiotic critique of social media and its role in the global visual economy.