Briony Hannell

I am a qualitative feminist researcher and sociologist with extensive teaching experience. At the University of Manchester, I am a member of The Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. While I am formally trained in cultural politics and media and cultural studies, my interdisciplinary research spans across feminist sociology, cultural studies, media and communications, and internet studies. My research on young people, feminism and anti-feminism, gender politics, and digital platforms and cultures has been featured in The Observer, Vice, The Independent, Dazed, WIRED, BBC Radio, and more. My first book, Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024.

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the following:

• Digital feminisms and anti-feminisms
• Youth, gender, and gender relations
• Reactionary (gender) politics
• Participatory and digital culture
• Social media platforms

My first book, Feminist Fandom, locates interest-based digital peer cultures as an important space where young people produce, negotiate, and contest the meanings of feminism(s) in an everyday context. It positions digital youth cultures on the social media platform Tumblr as a fruitful site for young people to engage in feminist activism, community building, and knowledge sharing. However, it also complicates utopian framings of these digital spaces to reveal the contradictory and ambivalent processes of inclusion and exclusion at work within them.

My recent and in-progress work has two key strands. Firstly, I am exploring the so-called ‘toxic’, or reactionary, turn in contemporary gender politics, for example in the global rise of ‘anti-gender’ politics, or in the wide impact of the manosphere on digital culture. Secondly, I am examining the shifting power and perception of social media platforms in the age of synthetic media and Generative AI.

I am primarily a qualitative researcher and I have used ethnographic methods (both online and offline), including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, qualitative surveys, discourse analysis, and textual analysis.

I have also used digital methods, including 'scroll and scrape' techniques, network visualisation and analysis, platform walkthroughs, platform analysis, and critical technocultural discourse analysis.

I have extensive experience designing and delivering introductory and specialist teaching, learning, and assessment to a diverse range of university students at all levels of study. I have experience acting as programme lead, academic adviser, module organiser, lecturer, dissertation supervisor, PhD supervisor, workshop leader, and seminar leader. My teaching experience spans across sociology, qualitative and digital research methods, (digital) media and communications, gender studies, and politics across a wide range of modules.

At the University of Manchester, I lead (or have led) the following modules: