Liang Ge

Liang Ge (they/them) is a Lecturer of Sociology at Manchester, where Liang is a member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Life. Liang is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL. Liang's work lies in the intersection of intimacy, digital media and technologies, digital methods, gender & sexuality, youth and East and Southeast Asian popular cultures and creative industries. Liang's research seeks to elucidate how digital media and technologies function as terrains of struggle, and to explore how queerness and feminism in digital cultures act as the very creative drive that generates transgressive and transformative potentials. 

Prior to joining Manchester, Liang taught and researched at University College London, King’s College London and City, University of London. Liang is the founder and Co-Chair of the Transcultural Digital Intimacies Research Network (TransDI). Liang has received multiple grants from AHRC, ESRC and British Academy as well as industrial fundings including OpenAI and Tencent. Their current research project is Posthuman Digital Intimacy and Wellbeing: Affects, Women and Digital Technologies, which explores the affective experiences of women who play women-oriented video games and intensively use AI-generated social robots in East and Southeast Asia and examine the multi-facets of such more-than-human digital intimacies with virtual characters.

Liang is the author of two forthcoming monographs Ambivalent Desires: Affect and Boys Love in China (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and The Danmei Culture in Chinese Media and Society (with Dr. Tingting Hu,  Routledge/Amsterdam University Press, 2026). Their research appears in journals including Sociology, Big Data & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Feminist Theory, Convergence, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum and Asian Studies Review, among others.

Liang sits in the Editorial Boards of Sociology (2025- ) and The Sociological Review (2025- ).

Liang's research on digital media and technologies, young people, gender&sexuality, digital platforms and popular cultures has been featured  in BBC News; New York Times; AFP; New Scientist; South China Morning Post, Vice News and ARD German TV.

Email: [email protected]