Postdigital Intimacies

Lindsay Anne Balfour is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures and works within the Postdigital Intimacies research cluster. She is an experienced, researcher, public speaker, and author with international experience in the non-profit sector and formal academia. She has held grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and earned her PhD from the University of British Columbia. Her research draws on the philosophical concept of hospitality to consider the relationship between humans and machines (HCI), and employs an intersectional feminist and cultural studies perspective to look at digital intimacies. Currently, she is conducting feminist analyses of surveillance capitalism and embodied computing including the concept of “tracking” through wearables, implantables, and ingestibles (FemTech). She is PI on a project in development for the Economic and Social Research Council that researches access and inclusion in FemTech, and the efficacy of digital interventions for gender-based violence. This work offers wider benefits concerning the global health of women, such as those outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals regarding Women and Girls, and in particular targets focusing on sexual and reproductive health.

Dr Balfour works with both academics and industry experts (including policymakers and regulators). Her most recent project was a pump-prime grant funded by Research England – “Preliminary Policy Stakeholder Engagement for Emergent FemTech and Women’s Digital Health.” She is also Co-I on the project “Postdigital Intimacies for Online Safety: Building policy recommendations through co-production partner workshops.”

Dr. Adrienne Evans is Reader for Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, where she leads the Postdigital Intimacies cluster. Her research focuses on accounts of intimacy in the context of a postfeminist sensibility, and is interested in exploring how digital feeling shapes expectations of the ‘good life’. In her research, she is interested in creating new ways of thinking about notions of the good life, wellbeing and positivity through digital technology in relation to the vulnerabilities these concepts engender, by seeking to stimulate more inclusive, equitable and feminist-inspired ways of being in the world. She is co-author of Technologies of Sexiness (2014), Postfeminism and Health (2018) and Postfeminism and Body Image (2022), and Digital Feeling (2023). She is PI of the AHRC network Postdigital Intimacies and the Networked Public-Private, CI on the Marsden Fund (New Zealand) project Exploring the possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences.

Godswill Ezeonyeka is a PhD researcher in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. His research uses the practice of documentary filmmaking to investigate the revolution of social media activism in Nigeria. He has an MA in Communications, Culture and Media from Coventry University.

Marcus Maloney is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. His research focuses on men and masculinities online; ideological contestations in digital spaces; video game narratives, cultures, and communities; and postdigital intimacies and socialities. Marcus has published widely in these areas, including articles in Cultural Sociology, New Media & Society, and Games and Culture. His most recent book is Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (Palgrave 2019).

Hannah L. Westwood is a PhD researcher in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, on a fully funded trailblazers studentship. She is investigating the FemTech industry,and how it can become more equitable, accessible and inclusive, with a particular focus on digital fertility trackers and digital contraception. Hannah has a forthcoming chapter ‘Reinventing the Beauty Myth? FemTech’s Cost to the Consumer’ in the edited collection Who is FemTech For? She graduated with an MA in Women’s Studies from the University of York in 2022.