Dr Ysabel Gerrard

BA (Hons), MA, PhD (University of Leeds)

Department of Sociological Studies

Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society

Undergraduate Admissions Officer

y.gerrard@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 6435

The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Ysabel Gerrard
Department of Sociological Studies
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH

Profile

Ysabel joined the Department of Sociological Studies in September 2017, having completed her PhD at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds and spending some time as an Intern at Microsoft Research New England. In addition to her research and teaching, Ysabel is the Chair of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) Digital Culture and Communication Section (2021-2022), and a member of Facebook’s Suicide and Self-Injury (SSI) Advisory Board.

She often talks to the press about her research and has appeared in venues like BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, NBC News, The Washington Post and WIRED.

Research interests

Ysabel’s research interests are in:

Young people’s experiences of social media
Digital identities (particularly gender)
Digital research methods and ethics

These research interests underpin her first manuscript – The Platform Generation: Young Lives and Social Media Content Policies – which is currently under contract with the University of California Press.

Ysabel’s research agenda is to produce knowledge that has clear and pragmatic social benefits, especially to vulnerable populations. For example, she submitted a REF 2021 Impact Case Study, titled Making Social Media Safer for People with Eating Disorders.

Publications

Journal articles

Gerrard Y (2022) Rethinking women’s guilty pleasures in a social media age: from soap opera to teen drama series. The Journal of Popular Television, 10(2), 185-198.
Sharp G & Gerrard Y (2022) The body image “problem” on social media: Novel directions for the field. Body Image, 41, 267-271.
Miltner KM & Gerrard Y (2021) “Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: a nostalgic (re)imagining of Myspace. Internet Histories.
Gerrard Y (2021) Groupies, fangirls and shippers: the endurance of a gender stereotype. American Behavioral Scientist. View this article in WRRO
McCosker A & Gerrard Y (2021) Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. New Media and Society, 23(7), 1899-1919. View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y (2020) The COVID-19 mental health content moderation conundrum. Social Media + Society, 6(3). View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y & Thornham H (2020) Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages. New Media and Society, 22(7), 1266-1286. View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y (2020) Social media content moderation : six opportunities for feminist intervention. Feminist Media Studies. View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y (2020) What’s in a (pseudo)name?: Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research. Qualitative Research. View this article in WRRO
Gillespie T, Aufderheide P, Carmi E, Gerrard Y, Gorwa R, Matamoros-Fernández A, Roberts ST, Sinnreich A & Myers West S (2020) Expanding the debate about content moderation: Scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. Internet Policy Review, 9(4).
Gerrard Y & Bates J (2019) Introduction to the data power special issue : tactics, access and shaping. Online Information Review, 43(6), 945-951. View this article in WRRO
Edwards L, Philip F & Gerrard Y (2019) Communicating feminist politics? The double-edged sword of using social media in a feminist organisation. Feminist Media Studies. View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y (2019) Convergence book reviews: Reflections on the field. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 25(2), 278-280.
Gerrard Y (2018) Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media. New Media and Society, 20(12), 4492-4511. View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y (2017) "It's a secret thing": Digital disembedding through online teen drama fandom. First Monday, 22(8). View this article in WRRO
Hill RL, Kennedy H & Gerrard Y (2016) Visualizing Junk: Big Data Visualizations and the need for Feminist Data Studies. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 40(4), 331-350. View this article in WRRO

Chapters

Are C & Gerrard Y (2023) Violence and the feminist potential of content moderation, The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence (pp. 473-482). Routledge

Book reviews

Gerrard Y (2019) Book review : Behind the Screen : Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Media & Society. View this article in WRRO
Gerrard Y (2017) Post, Mine, Repeat: social media data mining becomes ordinary. Information, Communication & Society, 20(12), 1817-1820.
Gerrard Y (2016) Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age, by Alice E. Marwick, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, 360 pp., £9.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-30-020938-9. Celebrity Studies, 7(3), 437-439.

Website content

Gerrard Y & Duffy BE BeReal and the Doomed Quest for Online Authenticity.
Gerrard Y Letter to the Editor: Teenage girls don't need to be 'saved' from social media.
Sharp G, Fardouly J, Bromberg M, Leaver T & Gerrard Y Instagram can make teens feel bad about their body, but parents can help. Here’s how..
Gerrard Y Social Apps That Go Suddenly Viral Put Kids at Risk.
Gerrard Y & McCosker A The Perils of Moderating Depression on Social Media.
Gerrard Y TikTok Has a Pro-Anorexia Problem.
Gerrard Y & Squirrell T The Perils of Livestreaming on Reddit.
Gerrard Y & Gillespie T When Algorithms Think You Want to Die.

Grants

Dates	Funder	Project title	Role	Amount
2021-2022	SIGN (Screen Industries Growth Network)	‘Creator labour: screen production cultures and transmedia intersectionality in Yorkshire’	Co-I	£39,985.50
2021	University of Sheffield Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Account	‘Risky-by-design: making the digital world safer for children’	N/A	£2627
2019-2022	British Academy Small Research Grant	‘Secrets on social media: exploring young people’s perspectives of anonymous secret-telling apps’	PI	£6998

Teaching interests

The modules Ysabel has designed and developed – Digital Identities and those about Digital Methods – draw on her own research interests and experiences. For example, she has spent some time at the Digital Methods Institute at the University of Amsterdam learning about their tools and approaches to social media research (see https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiAbout), and at Microsoft Research New England thinking about how social media content gets moderated and policed (see: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-new-england/).

She likes to incorporate aspects of students’ own lives, experiences and identities into her teaching practices, particularly how they use and understand social media platforms. She also encourages students to think about their privacy on social media, how they represent themselves, and how they use social media in different cultural, geographical, and legal contexts.

Teaching activities

Ysabel teaches the following modules in the 2021/22 academic year:

Semester 1

SCS3046 Digital Identities (module and seminar leader)

Semester 2

SCS111003: Introduction to Digital Methods Research (module and workshop leader)

Ysabel also supervises BA and MA Dissertation students working on a range of topics.

PhD supervision

Ysabel is currently supervising five PhD candidates:

2021-present: Ziwei Xu, working title TBD (co-supervisor)
2021-present: Alex Kirby-Reynolds, Crisis and the State: Politics and the Everyday Experience of Crises (temporary primary supervisor; co-supervisor)
2020-present: Beth Nutbrown, Toxicity, Trolling and Social Bonding: How the League of Legends Community Functions and Persists Amid Toxicity (secondary supervisor)
2020-present: Qiran Zheng, Developing Long-Term Intimate Relationships in a Social Reality Shaped by Social Media Platforms: A Qualitative Approach to Young Taiwanese Online Dating and Companionship App Users (co-supervisor)

2018-present: Amel Bakour, Investigating Women’s Attitudes Towards Algerian Social Media Influencers (co-supervisor)