Dr Briony Hannell (she/her)

While Briony is formally trained in cultural politics and the sociology of media and culture, her interdisciplinary research spans across feminist sociology, feminist cultural studies, media and communications, internet studies, girls’ studies, and fan studies. Briony is a qualitative feminist researcher and she uses ethnographic methods (both online and offline), including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, surveys, discourse analysis, and textual analysis. Her ethnographic research locates digital media fan communities as an important space for young people to produce, negotiate, and contest the meanings of feminism(s) in an informal and everyday context. In doing so, her work locates digital youth cultures on Tumblr as a fruitful site for young people to engage in feminist activism, community building, and knowledge sharing, while also complicating utopian framings of these digital spaces to reveal the contradictory and ambivalent processes of inclusion and exclusion at work within them. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the following:

• Youth and the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality
• Popular culture as a site of struggle
• Participatory culture and fandom
• Digital cultures and platforms
• Girls’ and young women’s media cultures
• Belonging, (cultural) citizenship and civic engagement
• Digital feminist pedagogy and knowledge sharing
• Feminist methodologies

Briony’s research on Tumblr has been featured in WIRED magazine, and she has been invited to interview as an expert on gender, popular culture, and fan culture for The Observer, Mashable, Vice, and BBC Radio, amongst others. Her first monograph will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in late 2023.