Helen Thornham
Biographic Data
| ID | 792162 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Helen Thornham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Helen |
| FAMILY NAME | Thornham |
| SIGNATURE | THORNHAM H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1302-6579 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Sociotechnical Infrastructures and Textures of Care: On the Consequences of Caring for ‘the System’
This article explores the possibilities and limitations of care within sociotechnical infrastructures, including semi-automated, bureaucratic, and machine learning systems. Emerging from an ongoing research project that started during the global pandemic and grounded in ethics of care approaches, our project critically interrogates how such infrastructures not only create conditions for care but also reconfigure care itself to align with their un…
Judders, Jabs, and Slips: Automation, Anomalies, Movements
In May 2019, the "Automation and Me" event invited digital artists from around the world to come together in an unused shopping center unit in the heart of Leeds, United Kingdom, to critically respond to and explore the themes of automation, embodiment, and identity. In this article, we draw on Tobias Matzner's argument that what algorithms are and do "emerges in a complex interplay of social practices, material properties, discourses, mathematic…
Don't Touch My MIDI Cables: Gender, Technology and Sound in Live Coding
Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological-human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human-technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or softw…
Digital culture meets data: Critical perspectives
Digital culture meets data: Critical perspectives
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 …
Not just a number? Neets, data and datalogical systems
This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in orde…
Beyond ‘pseudonymity’: The sociotechnical structure of online military forums
This article explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of publicly visible yet discursively intimate performances of military identity and sites of distinct power relations. This article draws on data collected from British military forums and the organisations that own and manage them. We consider the discursive online practices within the forums and the extent to which the technological affordances of ‘anonymit…
Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis
Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the g…
Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young Neets and digital practices
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and …
The digital mundane: Social media and the military
This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individuals position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social me…
Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)
This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation…
Capability in the digital: Institutional media management and its dis/contents
This paper explores how social media spaces are occupied, utilized and negotiated by the British Military in relation to the Ministry of Defence's concerns and conceptualizations of risk. It draws on data from the DUN Project to investigate the content and form of social media about defence through the lens of ‘capability’, a term that captures and describes the meaning behind multiple representations of the military institution. But ‘capability’…
Selfies beyond self-representation: The (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and me…
Irreconcilability in the Digital: Gender, Technological Imaginings and Maternal Subjectivity
Drawing on empirical research from two focus groups, this article investigates the narratives and discourses that emerged around pregnancy, technology, birth and motherhood. In so doing, the article engages in some long-standing debates within feminism around embodied and maternal subjectivity, agency and identity. Seen here, the focus groups serve initially to remind us of the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the continual ambiguity of, an…
Content cultures: Transformations of User Generated Content in Public Service Broadcasting
Introduction - Simon Popple & Helen Thornham Young People and the BBC News, Children and Citizenship: User-Generated Content and the BBC's Newsround Website - Maire Messenger Davies, Cynthia Carter, Stuart Allan, and Kaitlynn Mendes Fantasies of creative connectivity in BBC Blast - Helen Thornham & Angela McFarlane Interview with John Millner Fans, fan culture and the BBC Mobilising Specialist Music Fans Online - Tim Wall Making 'quality', class …
Claiming ‘creativity’: Discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice
Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20 years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evi…
The dis/embodiment of persuasive military discourse
Persuasive discourse is a fundamental aspect of contemporary asymmetric warfare where the power of military technologies has been displaced by the need for all parties to a conflict to persuade others to act in accordance with particular war aims. Here we suggest that persuasive military discourse evokes corporeality, transforming armies and enemies into individuals, and utilizing powerful corporeal imagery to fantasize ideals or imagine threats.…
Youthful ‘fictions’, creative ‘journeys’ and potential strategies of resistance
Architectures of youth: Visibility, Agency and the Technological Imaginings of Young People
This article investigates what we call the architectures of youth. Drawing on the 'unofficial' audio-visual recordings from an ongoing research project, and contrasting this footage with the new building that 'houses' our project, we argue that the young people are being constructed in a range of problematic ways that continue to emphasise visibility. The school building, complete with its panopticon tower, is premised on the symbolic power of th…
Discourses of the Digital Native: Use, non-use, and perceptions of use in BBC Blast
This article emerges from a long-term project investigating the BBC initiative ‘Blast’ – an on- and offline creative resource for teenagers. Designed to ‘inspire and equip’ young people to be creative, the research interrogates the assumptions behind such a resource, particularly in terms of the so-called ‘digital native’, and tests such assumptions against the populations actually using and engaging with it. It finds that the conception of a ‘di…
Cross-Generational Gender Constructions. Women, Teenagers and Technology
Despite the supposed inroads of feminism, gender equality and new 'democratic' means of technological communication, adult women and teenage girls in the UK continue to emphasise what Valerie Walkerdine has termed the 'habitual "feminine" position of incompetence' (2006, 526). This article draws on two complimentary research projects in order to investigate the cross-generational gender constructions women and teenagers articulate. Drawing on Neg…
Commentary and Criticism: Sex Workers in the News
It's A Boy Thing”: Gaming, gender, and geeks
The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the "cultural practices" of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are hi…
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 …
It's A Boy Thing”: Gaming, gender, and geeks
The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the "cultural practices" of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are hi…
Selfies beyond self-representation: The (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and me…
The digital mundane: Social media and the military
This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individuals position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social me…
Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)
This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation…
Architectures of youth: Visibility, Agency and the Technological Imaginings of Young People
This article investigates what we call the architectures of youth. Drawing on the 'unofficial' audio-visual recordings from an ongoing research project, and contrasting this footage with the new building that 'houses' our project, we argue that the young people are being constructed in a range of problematic ways that continue to emphasise visibility. The school building, complete with its panopticon tower, is premised on the symbolic power of th…
Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young Neets and digital practices
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and …
Claiming ‘creativity’: Discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice
Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20 years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evi…
The dis/embodiment of persuasive military discourse
Persuasive discourse is a fundamental aspect of contemporary asymmetric warfare where the power of military technologies has been displaced by the need for all parties to a conflict to persuade others to act in accordance with particular war aims. Here we suggest that persuasive military discourse evokes corporeality, transforming armies and enemies into individuals, and utilizing powerful corporeal imagery to fantasize ideals or imagine threats.…
Youthful ‘fictions’, creative ‘journeys’ and potential strategies of resistance
Beyond ‘pseudonymity’: The sociotechnical structure of online military forums
This article explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of publicly visible yet discursively intimate performances of military identity and sites of distinct power relations. This article draws on data collected from British military forums and the organisations that own and manage them. We consider the discursive online practices within the forums and the extent to which the technological affordances of ‘anonymit…
Commentary and Criticism: Sex Workers in the News
It's A Boy Thing”: Gaming, gender, and geeks
The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the "cultural practices" of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are hi…
Commentary and Criticism: Sex Workers in the News
Discourses of the Digital Native: Use, non-use, and perceptions of use in BBC Blast
This article emerges from a long-term project investigating the BBC initiative ‘Blast’ – an on- and offline creative resource for teenagers. Designed to ‘inspire and equip’ young people to be creative, the research interrogates the assumptions behind such a resource, particularly in terms of the so-called ‘digital native’, and tests such assumptions against the populations actually using and engaging with it. It finds that the conception of a ‘di…
Cross-Generational Gender Constructions. Women, Teenagers and Technology
Despite the supposed inroads of feminism, gender equality and new 'democratic' means of technological communication, adult women and teenage girls in the UK continue to emphasise what Valerie Walkerdine has termed the 'habitual "feminine" position of incompetence' (2006, 526). This article draws on two complimentary research projects in order to investigate the cross-generational gender constructions women and teenagers articulate. Drawing on Neg…
The dis/embodiment of persuasive military discourse
Persuasive discourse is a fundamental aspect of contemporary asymmetric warfare where the power of military technologies has been displaced by the need for all parties to a conflict to persuade others to act in accordance with particular war aims. Here we suggest that persuasive military discourse evokes corporeality, transforming armies and enemies into individuals, and utilizing powerful corporeal imagery to fantasize ideals or imagine threats.…
Youthful ‘fictions’, creative ‘journeys’ and potential strategies of resistance
Architectures of youth: Visibility, Agency and the Technological Imaginings of Young People
This article investigates what we call the architectures of youth. Drawing on the 'unofficial' audio-visual recordings from an ongoing research project, and contrasting this footage with the new building that 'houses' our project, we argue that the young people are being constructed in a range of problematic ways that continue to emphasise visibility. The school building, complete with its panopticon tower, is premised on the symbolic power of th…
Claiming ‘creativity’: Discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice
Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20 years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evi…
Content cultures: Transformations of User Generated Content in Public Service Broadcasting
Introduction - Simon Popple & Helen Thornham Young People and the BBC News, Children and Citizenship: User-Generated Content and the BBC's Newsround Website - Maire Messenger Davies, Cynthia Carter, Stuart Allan, and Kaitlynn Mendes Fantasies of creative connectivity in BBC Blast - Helen Thornham & Angela McFarlane Interview with John Millner Fans, fan culture and the BBC Mobilising Specialist Music Fans Online - Tim Wall Making 'quality', class …
Capability in the digital: Institutional media management and its dis/contents
This paper explores how social media spaces are occupied, utilized and negotiated by the British Military in relation to the Ministry of Defence's concerns and conceptualizations of risk. It draws on data from the DUN Project to investigate the content and form of social media about defence through the lens of ‘capability’, a term that captures and describes the meaning behind multiple representations of the military institution. But ‘capability’…
Selfies beyond self-representation: The (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and me…
Irreconcilability in the Digital: Gender, Technological Imaginings and Maternal Subjectivity
Drawing on empirical research from two focus groups, this article investigates the narratives and discourses that emerged around pregnancy, technology, birth and motherhood. In so doing, the article engages in some long-standing debates within feminism around embodied and maternal subjectivity, agency and identity. Seen here, the focus groups serve initially to remind us of the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the continual ambiguity of, an…
Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis
Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the g…
Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young Neets and digital practices
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and …
The digital mundane: Social media and the military
This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individuals position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social me…
Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)
This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation…
Beyond ‘pseudonymity’: The sociotechnical structure of online military forums
This article explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of publicly visible yet discursively intimate performances of military identity and sites of distinct power relations. This article draws on data collected from British military forums and the organisations that own and manage them. We consider the discursive online practices within the forums and the extent to which the technological affordances of ‘anonymit…
Not just a number? Neets, data and datalogical systems
This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in orde…
Digital culture meets data: Critical perspectives
Digital culture meets data: Critical perspectives
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 …
Don't Touch My MIDI Cables: Gender, Technology and Sound in Live Coding
Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological-human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human-technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or softw…
Judders, Jabs, and Slips: Automation, Anomalies, Movements
In May 2019, the "Automation and Me" event invited digital artists from around the world to come together in an unused shopping center unit in the heart of Leeds, United Kingdom, to critically respond to and explore the themes of automation, embodiment, and identity. In this article, we draw on Tobias Matzner's argument that what algorithms are and do "emerges in a complex interplay of social practices, material properties, discourses, mathematic…
Sociotechnical Infrastructures and Textures of Care: On the Consequences of Caring for ‘the System’
This article explores the possibilities and limitations of care within sociotechnical infrastructures, including semi-automated, bureaucratic, and machine learning systems. Emerging from an ongoing research project that started during the global pandemic and grounded in ethics of care approaches, our project critically interrogates how such infrastructures not only create conditions for care but also reconfigure care itself to align with their un…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (16 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Social science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)