Ysabel Gerrard
Biographic Data
| ID | 292133 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ysabel Gerrard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ysabel |
| FAMILY NAME | Gerrard |
| SIGNATURE | GERRARD Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1298-9365 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Algorithms for her? 2: Feminist Approaches to Digital Infrastructures, Cultures and Economies
This Special Issue of the Journal of Gender Studies is about algorithmic culture. It is about the values and normativities that are encoded into algorithmic technologies and techniques, and the ways in which algorithms in turn shape contemporary identity formations, across intersections of gender, race, sexuality and disability. It is also about the people who help constitute and reify algorithmic culture – from tech developers, investors and ent…
Rethinking women’s guilty pleasures in a social media age: From soap opera to teen drama series
Fans of teen drama television series often feel that their pleasures are devalued. The history of research into soap opera fans (the genre from which teen drama series derive) tells us that this is unsurprising, as women’s popular pleasures have long been denigrated. Gaining global popularity in the mid-2000s, teen drama fandoms have almost exclusively played out on social media, and this article asks how fans’ experiences of their ‘guilty pleasu…
Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers: The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype
The purpose of this special issue is to offer new perspectives on fan cultures which respond to changes and controversies that have happened since the last American Behavioral Scientist special issue on fandom was published, in 2005. But the aim of my contribution is to argue that, sadly, derisive-gendered discourses like 'fangirls', 'groupies' and 'shippers' are still alive and well. Returning to the kind of research conducted in the 1980s - whe…
What Dead-and-Dying Platforms Do for Internet Studies: Situating Technological Failure, Digital Afterlife, and the Web That Was
This panel explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with technological failure, power dynamics, and the divergent notions of the digital afterlife. Collectively, the contributions address the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when various platforms fail, decline, or expire. We bring together five presentations that draw …
Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: A nostalgic (re)imagining of Myspace
This paper provides an analysis of a nostalgic Myspace discourse that contradicts the narrative of Myspace as a failed platform. The Myspace nostalgia discourse is especially dominant on Twitter and responds to what Miltner refers to as the “coding fetish discourse”. It re-imagines Myspace through the lens of digital skill development and reinforces the framing of coding as a net good for social mobility, particularly for women and people of colo…
What's in a (pseudo)name? Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research
Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are turning to social media platforms as research sites, and as platforms expand their communicative possibilities, they create more spaces for users to enact a multitude of identities. Most platforms allow users to have 'pseudonymous' identities; that is, they can engage in practices intended to facilitate nonidentifiable content. But pseudonymity presents a series of unique challenges to the principles of …
Expanding the debate about content moderation: Scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates
Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which functions in many contexts and takes many forms. Expanding the discussion also changes how we asses…
Methods That Move Us: Creativity and Ethics in Researching Digital Youth Cultures
For scholars exploring digital youth cultures, creative research methods offer the potential to disrupt existing power imbalances, form empowering creative practices or closely engage with knowledge production that is dynamic, embodied and socially contextual. Yet the experience of doing creative research methods poses challenges that are often under- or unacknowledged in our work. This roundtable brings together researchers from different countr…
‘Please Read the Comments’: Commenting Cultures Across Platforms
An old adage about the internet goes “Don’t Read The Comments”. It is a cynical word of caution from supposedly more experienced and savvy internet users, against a slew of negative, abusive, and unhelpful comments that are usually rampant online, stemming from trolling behaviour (Phillips 2015). “Don’t Read The Comments” has become an internet meme. Alongside parody websites (i.e. @AvoidComments n.d.), trawling through the comments section in se…
Social media content moderation: Six opportunities for feminist intervention
Social media content moderation—making and enforcing rules about the content that can (and cannot) be posted to a social media platform—is anything but neutral. While this form of governance has lo
Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages
This article proposes ‘sexist assemblages’ as a way of understanding how the human and mechanical elements that make up social media content moderation assemble to perpetuate normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and to police content related to women and their bodies. It investigates sexist assemblages through three of many potential elements: (1) the normatively gendered content presented to users through in-platform keyword …
Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology
Heavily used hashtags on Instagram and other platforms can indicate extensive public engagement with issues, events or collective experiences. This article extends existing research methods to paint a fuller picture of how people engage collectively with public issues online. Focussing on Instagram content often deemed ‘problematic’, we develop and test what we call a ‘hashtag practice’ approach. This approach targets the hashtag #depressed, and …
The Covid-19 Mental Health Content Moderation Conundrum
At the time of writing (mid-May 2020), mental health charities around the world have experienced an unprecedented surge in demand. At the same time, record-high numbers of people are turning to social media to maintain personal connections due to restrictions on physical movement. But organizations like the mental health charity Mind and even the UK Government have expressed concerns about the possible strain on mental health that may come from s…
Communicating feminist politics? The double-edged sword of using social media in a feminist organisation
Media coverage of violence against women and girls (VAWG) has increased in recent years, due to high-profile investigations such as the 2012 Jimmy Savile case in the UK, and in response to the #MeToo movement in the USA. Feminist organisations are likely to be asked for comment by the media as a result, but journalistic interest in case details rather than systemic causes of VAWG means that political messages focused on ending VAWG remain difficu…
Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media
Out of the shadows, out from behind the screen, and into the light.(p.222) Sarah T. Roberts' Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media offers a ground-breaking exploration of commercial content moderation (CCM): a term the author coined to denote the essential yet taken-for-granted human labour of 'screen[ing] content uploaded to the internet's social media sites on behalf of the firms that solicit user participation' (…
Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media
Social media companies make important decisions about what counts as “problematic” content and how they will remove it. Some choose to moderate hashtags, blocking the results for certain tag searches and issuing public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling terms. The hashtag has thus become an indicator of where problematic content can be found, but this has produced limited understandings of how such content actually circu…
Post, Mine, Repeat: Social media data mining becomes ordinary
In times of datafication, we are producing more and more social media (and other) data. But this opens up new avenues for it to be collected, stored, classified, analysed, and disseminated: for it
"It's a secret thing": Digital disembedding through online teen drama fandom
Fans of teen drama television series often feel that their pleasures are unworthy, with many going to great lengths to hide their practices from certain people. Social media plays a key role in contemporary fan cultures, and so fans must navigate platforms’ changing and complex norms around their users’ identity in careful and strategic ways. These acts counter recent scholarly claims about the ‘embeddedness’ (or entanglement, enmeshing) of socia…
Visualizing Junk: Big Data Visualizations and the Need for Feminist Data Studies
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cult…
Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media
Social media companies make important decisions about what counts as “problematic” content and how they will remove it. Some choose to moderate hashtags, blocking the results for certain tag searches and issuing public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling terms. The hashtag has thus become an indicator of where problematic content can be found, but this has produced limited understandings of how such content actually circu…
Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages
This article proposes ‘sexist assemblages’ as a way of understanding how the human and mechanical elements that make up social media content moderation assemble to perpetuate normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and to police content related to women and their bodies. It investigates sexist assemblages through three of many potential elements: (1) the normatively gendered content presented to users through in-platform keyword …
Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology
Heavily used hashtags on Instagram and other platforms can indicate extensive public engagement with issues, events or collective experiences. This article extends existing research methods to paint a fuller picture of how people engage collectively with public issues online. Focussing on Instagram content often deemed ‘problematic’, we develop and test what we call a ‘hashtag practice’ approach. This approach targets the hashtag #depressed, and …
What's in a (pseudo)name? Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research
Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are turning to social media platforms as research sites, and as platforms expand their communicative possibilities, they create more spaces for users to enact a multitude of identities. Most platforms allow users to have 'pseudonymous' identities; that is, they can engage in practices intended to facilitate nonidentifiable content. But pseudonymity presents a series of unique challenges to the principles of …
Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: A nostalgic (re)imagining of Myspace
This paper provides an analysis of a nostalgic Myspace discourse that contradicts the narrative of Myspace as a failed platform. The Myspace nostalgia discourse is especially dominant on Twitter and responds to what Miltner refers to as the “coding fetish discourse”. It re-imagines Myspace through the lens of digital skill development and reinforces the framing of coding as a net good for social mobility, particularly for women and people of colo…
Communicating feminist politics? The double-edged sword of using social media in a feminist organisation
Media coverage of violence against women and girls (VAWG) has increased in recent years, due to high-profile investigations such as the 2012 Jimmy Savile case in the UK, and in response to the #MeToo movement in the USA. Feminist organisations are likely to be asked for comment by the media as a result, but journalistic interest in case details rather than systemic causes of VAWG means that political messages focused on ending VAWG remain difficu…
Visualizing Junk: Big Data Visualizations and the Need for Feminist Data Studies
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cult…
Social media content moderation: Six opportunities for feminist intervention
Social media content moderation—making and enforcing rules about the content that can (and cannot) be posted to a social media platform—is anything but neutral. While this form of governance has lo
Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers: The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype
The purpose of this special issue is to offer new perspectives on fan cultures which respond to changes and controversies that have happened since the last American Behavioral Scientist special issue on fandom was published, in 2005. But the aim of my contribution is to argue that, sadly, derisive-gendered discourses like 'fangirls', 'groupies' and 'shippers' are still alive and well. Returning to the kind of research conducted in the 1980s - whe…
The Covid-19 Mental Health Content Moderation Conundrum
At the time of writing (mid-May 2020), mental health charities around the world have experienced an unprecedented surge in demand. At the same time, record-high numbers of people are turning to social media to maintain personal connections due to restrictions on physical movement. But organizations like the mental health charity Mind and even the UK Government have expressed concerns about the possible strain on mental health that may come from s…
Visualizing Junk: Big Data Visualizations and the Need for Feminist Data Studies
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cult…
Post, Mine, Repeat: Social media data mining becomes ordinary
In times of datafication, we are producing more and more social media (and other) data. But this opens up new avenues for it to be collected, stored, classified, analysed, and disseminated: for it
"It's a secret thing": Digital disembedding through online teen drama fandom
Fans of teen drama television series often feel that their pleasures are unworthy, with many going to great lengths to hide their practices from certain people. Social media plays a key role in contemporary fan cultures, and so fans must navigate platforms’ changing and complex norms around their users’ identity in careful and strategic ways. These acts counter recent scholarly claims about the ‘embeddedness’ (or entanglement, enmeshing) of socia…
Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media
Social media companies make important decisions about what counts as “problematic” content and how they will remove it. Some choose to moderate hashtags, blocking the results for certain tag searches and issuing public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling terms. The hashtag has thus become an indicator of where problematic content can be found, but this has produced limited understandings of how such content actually circu…
Communicating feminist politics? The double-edged sword of using social media in a feminist organisation
Media coverage of violence against women and girls (VAWG) has increased in recent years, due to high-profile investigations such as the 2012 Jimmy Savile case in the UK, and in response to the #MeToo movement in the USA. Feminist organisations are likely to be asked for comment by the media as a result, but journalistic interest in case details rather than systemic causes of VAWG means that political messages focused on ending VAWG remain difficu…
Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media
Out of the shadows, out from behind the screen, and into the light.(p.222) Sarah T. Roberts' Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media offers a ground-breaking exploration of commercial content moderation (CCM): a term the author coined to denote the essential yet taken-for-granted human labour of 'screen[ing] content uploaded to the internet's social media sites on behalf of the firms that solicit user participation' (…
Expanding the debate about content moderation: Scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates
Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which functions in many contexts and takes many forms. Expanding the discussion also changes how we asses…
Methods That Move Us: Creativity and Ethics in Researching Digital Youth Cultures
For scholars exploring digital youth cultures, creative research methods offer the potential to disrupt existing power imbalances, form empowering creative practices or closely engage with knowledge production that is dynamic, embodied and socially contextual. Yet the experience of doing creative research methods poses challenges that are often under- or unacknowledged in our work. This roundtable brings together researchers from different countr…
‘Please Read the Comments’: Commenting Cultures Across Platforms
An old adage about the internet goes “Don’t Read The Comments”. It is a cynical word of caution from supposedly more experienced and savvy internet users, against a slew of negative, abusive, and unhelpful comments that are usually rampant online, stemming from trolling behaviour (Phillips 2015). “Don’t Read The Comments” has become an internet meme. Alongside parody websites (i.e. @AvoidComments n.d.), trawling through the comments section in se…
Social media content moderation: Six opportunities for feminist intervention
Social media content moderation—making and enforcing rules about the content that can (and cannot) be posted to a social media platform—is anything but neutral. While this form of governance has lo
Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages
This article proposes ‘sexist assemblages’ as a way of understanding how the human and mechanical elements that make up social media content moderation assemble to perpetuate normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and to police content related to women and their bodies. It investigates sexist assemblages through three of many potential elements: (1) the normatively gendered content presented to users through in-platform keyword …
Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology
Heavily used hashtags on Instagram and other platforms can indicate extensive public engagement with issues, events or collective experiences. This article extends existing research methods to paint a fuller picture of how people engage collectively with public issues online. Focussing on Instagram content often deemed ‘problematic’, we develop and test what we call a ‘hashtag practice’ approach. This approach targets the hashtag #depressed, and …
The Covid-19 Mental Health Content Moderation Conundrum
At the time of writing (mid-May 2020), mental health charities around the world have experienced an unprecedented surge in demand. At the same time, record-high numbers of people are turning to social media to maintain personal connections due to restrictions on physical movement. But organizations like the mental health charity Mind and even the UK Government have expressed concerns about the possible strain on mental health that may come from s…
What Dead-and-Dying Platforms Do for Internet Studies: Situating Technological Failure, Digital Afterlife, and the Web That Was
This panel explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with technological failure, power dynamics, and the divergent notions of the digital afterlife. Collectively, the contributions address the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when various platforms fail, decline, or expire. We bring together five presentations that draw …
Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: A nostalgic (re)imagining of Myspace
This paper provides an analysis of a nostalgic Myspace discourse that contradicts the narrative of Myspace as a failed platform. The Myspace nostalgia discourse is especially dominant on Twitter and responds to what Miltner refers to as the “coding fetish discourse”. It re-imagines Myspace through the lens of digital skill development and reinforces the framing of coding as a net good for social mobility, particularly for women and people of colo…
What's in a (pseudo)name? Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research
Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are turning to social media platforms as research sites, and as platforms expand their communicative possibilities, they create more spaces for users to enact a multitude of identities. Most platforms allow users to have 'pseudonymous' identities; that is, they can engage in practices intended to facilitate nonidentifiable content. But pseudonymity presents a series of unique challenges to the principles of …
Rethinking women’s guilty pleasures in a social media age: From soap opera to teen drama series
Fans of teen drama television series often feel that their pleasures are devalued. The history of research into soap opera fans (the genre from which teen drama series derive) tells us that this is unsurprising, as women’s popular pleasures have long been denigrated. Gaining global popularity in the mid-2000s, teen drama fandoms have almost exclusively played out on social media, and this article asks how fans’ experiences of their ‘guilty pleasu…
Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers: The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype
The purpose of this special issue is to offer new perspectives on fan cultures which respond to changes and controversies that have happened since the last American Behavioral Scientist special issue on fandom was published, in 2005. But the aim of my contribution is to argue that, sadly, derisive-gendered discourses like 'fangirls', 'groupies' and 'shippers' are still alive and well. Returning to the kind of research conducted in the 1980s - whe…
Algorithms for her? 2: Feminist Approaches to Digital Infrastructures, Cultures and Economies
This Special Issue of the Journal of Gender Studies is about algorithmic culture. It is about the values and normativities that are encoded into algorithmic technologies and techniques, and the ways in which algorithms in turn shape contemporary identity formations, across intersections of gender, race, sexuality and disability. It is also about the people who help constitute and reify algorithmic culture – from tech developers, investors and ent…
Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Social media (13 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · World Wide Web (9 works)