In a time of rapid technological change, MediaLab opens up an interdisciplinary space for critically examining lived experiences of contemporary media cultures. From Generative Al and postdigital intimacies, to gendered violence and public feelings, our work considers how media cultures shape the politics of identity, produce intimacy, frame creativity, and negotiate the terms of public belonging.
MediaLab focuses on affective and attentional textures of everyday media engagement, asking how media technologies organise habits, capture and shape attention, and structure the lived realities of daily life. Our work attends to the politics of emotion in networked media, exploring how feelings of boredom, disconnection, and anger, but also empathy, consent, and care are channelled and modulated in an age of always-on media engagement.
Through feminist media critique, we analyse the gendered norms and embodied intimacies that take shape across a diverse range of networked media environments, paying close attention to the intersectional and social justice dimensions of digital culture.
Our work also engages with digital intimacies/postdigital youth cultures, with research focusing on short-form video performance on platforms like TikTok, intimate communicative encounters on Snapchat, digital inclusion and the dissolving emotional boundaries between humans and AI via therapeutic chatbots, and forms of postdigital intimacy.
Emerging research in MediaLab focuses on the rise of Generative AI technologies and their multifaceted implications. This includes investigations into the potential harms of deepfakes in educational settings, with an emphasis on rethinking consent; critical analyses of user-generated AI content and the concept of ‘AI slop’; and co-creative applications of Generative AI tools.
Across these projects, our shared focus is on probing the ethical, creative, and affective dimensions that Generative AI is opening up, highlighting the complex ways these technologies are reshaping media practices and cultural production and consumption.
By analysing the feelings that converge around digital media platforms and their use, our work asks:
Dr Tina Kendall's research examines boredom as a lens for understanding everyday social media use as it intersects with wider questions of attention, affect, and the imperative to remain engaged and entertained.
Read more about Boredom and Always-On Media Cultures
Prof Tanya Horeck’s impact-focused work seeks to empower young people to navigate digital spaces safely and to assist teachers and parents in supporting them.
Read more about Preventing Technology-Facilitated Violence and Deepfake Sexual AbuseDr Harriet Fletcher’s research on Gothic Celebrity explores the relationship between the Gothic and celebrity across multiple media sites, with her latest work considering the links between performance, aesthetics, stardom and age.
Dr Sarah Gibson Yates’s work on the feeling interface between humans and digital media focuses on creative applications of Generative AI and other digital media in storytelling and narrative design practice in film and fiction.
Prof Tanya Horeck’s research focuses on representations of gender and sexual violence in the media, as well as empirically-grounded research into technology-facilitated gender-based violence on social media platforms. Her study on the labour of intimacy coordinators with Dr Susan Berridge (University of Stirling) examines how the role seeks to embed processes of care in media production.
Dr Elizabeth Johnson’s work addresses the public monument through the lens of social media, examining how the monument has become an emotive trigger in online culture wars and how contemporary artists have responded to this shift.
Dr Tina Kendall’s work on YouTube, Instagram, Vine, TikTok and Pinterest focuses on the aesthetics and politics of emotion on social media, particularly in relation to 'minor' feelings such as boredom.