Alison Winch

Alison is a Lecturer in Media Studies. Her publications include the monograph, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Palgrave, 2013). She has recently co-edited special issues on ‘An Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies: Conflicts and Connectivities’ for Feminist Media Studies (2016); ‘Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Technologies and Relationships for Journal of Gender Studies (2017); and ‘Neoliberalism, Transnationalism, Feminism’ for Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture (2019).

Her book The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity, Technology, Gender which is co-authored with Ben Little will be published by Routledge in 2020. This book offers a critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, presenting them as a coherent group. It addresses their collective power, influence and ideology, their group dynamics and the role they play in the wider socio-cultural and political formations of digital capitalism. The book interrogates not only the founders’ political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in everyday life. Using a database of ideological texts about and by the founders, the book provides robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of command. In addition, the concept of a patriarchal assemblage is used to make connections between political economy and online misogyny.

Alison’s research also explores intimacy and sexual politics in a branded media culture. She has written about specific topics that include generation, brand sociality, celebrity, wedding media, ‘the girlfriend gaze’, chick flicks, male fitness networks.

Alison is also a poet. Her poetry pamphlet, Trouble, was published in 2016 (The Emma Press). Her debut collection, Darling, It’s Me will be published by Penned in the Margins in June 2019. Alison is poetry editor and a member of the editorial collective of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. She is a reviewer for Palgrave and Routledge, as well as a number of journals including Feminist Media Studies, Celebrity Studies, Sexualities, European Journal of Cultural Studies. She welcomes applications from prospective PhD students who want to work in one of her areas of research interest.