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Research project

Queer Joy as a Digital Good

Project overview

This project conceptualises queer joy in online spaces as a digital good. We therefore argue that the affordances a technology or platform has for enabling joy are vital indicators of its ‘health’ in a good society. We foreground queer joy as a practice of personal and collective resilience amidst a socio-political landscape of increasing queerphobia. By exploring how it is imagined, platformed, and performed, we seek to identify how interested parties (e.g., users, regulators, policymakers) can explicitly facilitate queer joy in future digital spaces. In so doing, we centre queer users, their knowledge, and their experience. Our work seeks to facilitate queer joy through the development of a standard that platforms and policymakers can refer to as a benchmark for their provision. We also seek to bring academics, user-communities, practitioners, and policymakers together in developing critical media literacies, highlighting the role of joy as an act of resistance against oppression.

Co-Investigators:
Carolina Are (University of Northumbria)
Genavee Brown (University of Northumbria)
Sarah Clinch (University of Manchester)
Ben Dalton (Leeds Beckett University)
Madeleine Steeds (University College Dublin)
Dawn Woolley (Leeds Arts University)

Staff

Lead researcher

Dr Lexi Webster

Deputy Director of Digital Humanities

Research interests

  • corpus-based critical discourse studies
  • social media and communication
  • gender, sexuality and power