Digital Society PGRs
John H: Digital sex, digital self, digital cultures: cultural variability amongst dating apps used by queer masculinities and iterations of non-normative identity.
This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of sociology and humanities, analysing queer masculinities’ use of dating apps. Specifically, it will research the ways in which dating app users choose different dating apps to find intimacies and connect with each other. It uses a multimethod approach using the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light et al, 2018), profile analysis, semi-structured interviews and reflective ethnography as to enable users’ to elucidate their decision making on why they use particular apps, and how this influences the ways in which they present online. The first section of the PhD will begin by using participant data to distinguish dating apps as platforms with individual cultural expectations informed by both app interfaces and users own interpretations. The second section gives voice to unexpected participant identities online that resist platform interface expectations through self-presentation styles, namely anonymously and as [polyamorous] couples.
Supervised by Prof Ben Light and Dr Lisa Garwood-Cross.
Carlos Frade: After the human: social science in the face of the digital, climate change and human oppression.
This research programme aims at examining the ability and capacity of sociology, criminology and other social sciences, to deal with what probably are the most pressing issues today, three tightly intertwined problems: (1) The digital, that is, digital (cognitive, platform, surveillance) capitalism and its bio-tech and AI developments, which threaten to replace the human in a not-too-distant future. (2) Climate change, that is, impending ecological disaster, which threatens the survival of human and nonhuman life on earth. (3) Finally, human oppression and domination which, although neglected and obscured in mainstream literature, is however at the heart of the supposed impossibility to act not only against climate change but also against bio-tech and AI developments which will reinforce the growing and ever-thicker and more unbearable oligarchic structures of oppression and domination.
More in particular, the research seeks to assess the extent to which the social sciences, particularly those currents pervaded by posthumanism, new materialism and other nonhuman turn ontologies, provide orientation and nurture subjective equipment adequate to confront those problems. To that end, the research analyses the figures of subjectivation or, put simply, the subjectivities (forms of belief-conviction and emotion-affect that stand for what people ultimately want and strive for) that underpin the ways in which the social sciences address the aforementioned problems – hence the resort to ‘analytics of subjectivation’ as main mode of analyses.