Literature
A systematic review of literature on feminist social media research
As part of this project, in 2022 we led a review of literature on feminist approaches to social media research, conducted by graduate student Vanessa Smikle. Through this review, we identified core tenets of feminist social media research along with questions for thinking through this approach.
Key tenets of feminist approaches to research on social media
Thinking with other critical scholars
We are definitely not the first people to be thinking about feminist and more critical approaches to doing research on or through social media. Here we share some of the work that inspires us, as well as our own work. We invite you to share your work with us too.
Bailey, M. (2015). #transform(ing) DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(2).
Carlson, B., & Frazer, R. (2021). Indigenous digital life: The practice and politics of being Indigenous on social media. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Elwood, S., & Leszczynski, A. (2018). Feminist digital geographies. Gender, Place & Culture, 25(5), 629-644.
Leszczynski, A. (2020). Digital methods III: The digital mundane. Progress in Human geography, 44(6), 1194-1201.
Luka, M. E., Millette, M., & Wallace, J. (2017). A feminist perspective on ethical digital methods. Internet research ethics for the social age, 21-36.
McLean, J., Maalsen, S., & McNamara, N. (2020). Doing gender in the digital: feminist geographic methods changing research?. In Routledge handbook of gender and feminist geographies (pp. 467-475). Routledge.
Morrow, O., Hawkins, R., & Kern, L. (2015). Feminist research in online spaces. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(4), 526-543.
DIGITAL METHODS
SOCIAL MEDIA METHODS
Dieterle, B. (2021). People as data?: Developing an ethical framework for feminist digital research. Computers and Composition, 59, 102630.
Drenten, J., & Gurrieri, L. (2025). Conducting qualitative social media research through a feminist ethic of care. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal.
Luka, M. E., & Millette, M. (2018). (Re) framing big data: Activating situated knowledges and a feminist ethics of care in social media research. Social Media+ Society, 4(2), 2056305118768297.
Ott, K. (2018). Social media and feminist values: aligned or maligned? Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 39(1), 93-111.
WORK FROM THE RESEARCH TEAM
Drakopulos, L., Nost, E., Hawkins, R., & Silver, J. J. (2022). A Shark in your Pocket, A Bird in your Hand (Held): The Spectacular and Charismatic Visualisation of Nature in Conservation Apps. In Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities (pp. 303-316). Routledge.
Hawkins, R. (2018). Breaking down barriers of culture and geography? Caring-at-a-distance through web 2.0. New Political Science, 40(4), 727-743.
Hawkins, R., & Horst, N. (2020). Ethical consumption? There's an app for that. Digital technologies and everyday consumption practices. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 64(4), 590-601.
Hawkins, R., & Silver, J. J. (2017). From selfie to# sealfie: Nature 2.0 and the digital cultural politics of an internationally contested resource. Geoforum, 79, 114-123.
Kipp, A., & Hawkins, R. (2022). From the nice work to the hard work:“Troubling” community‐based CareMongering during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Gender, Work & Organization, 29(4), 1293-1313.
Militz, E. (2022). Soziale Medien als digitale intime Infrastrukturen: das Beispiel Instagram: Kommentar zu Jan Hutta und Nina Schuster "Infrastrukturen städtischer Intimität." sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, 10(2/3), 149-156.
Nelson, I. L., Hawkins, R., & Govia, L. (2023). Feminist digital natures. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(3), 2096-2109.
Schurr, C., Marquardt, N., & Militz, E. (2023). Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience. Progress in Human Geography, 47(2), 215-237.