Dr Ysabel Gerrard

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

School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations

Senior Lecturer in Digital Communication

School Student Recruitment Lead

y.gerrard@sheffield.ac.uk

The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Ysabel Gerrard
School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH

Profile

I joined the University of Sheffield as a Lecturer in September 2017, having completed my BA (Hons) degree, MA, and PhD at the University of Leeds’ School of Media and Communication. I was then promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2023. Uniting my research and teaching is a focus on how people - particularly children and young people - navigate their identities through social media platforms. My philosophy within research and pedagogical spaces is to understand the complex relationship between humans and the technologies they use, particularly social media, rather than framing one as having more power over the other.

I engage with various stakeholders as part of my work and am committed to translating knowledge into positive social impacts; for example, I have been a member of Meta’s Suicide and Self-Injury (SSI) Advisory Board since 2019 and have been directly involved in several changes to content policies (for example, banning the advertisement of diet products on Instagram). I also engage in consultancy work for TikTok’s policy team, have spoken at multiple Ofcom events, and was recently seconded to The 5Rights Foundation to produce an online resource for their Risky-by-Design initiative.

I enjoy speaking to the press about my research, and my expertise on topical issues relating to social media has been sought by a wide range of media outlets. Most recently, I have spoken to The Atlantic, BBC News, Business Insider, CNBC, Dazed Digital, Financial Times, HuffPost and Mashable. I am highly committed to sharing academic knowledge with non-academic audiences and have written articles for Glamour Magazine, The Conversation, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED (among other articles for WIRED, see ‘When Algorithms Think You Want To Die’, published in the U.S. and Japan), and Vice.

Research interests

Uniting my publications is a focus on the complex relationship between social media and our human identities. I am a qualitative researcher and have asked questions like:

How do vulnerable people work around social media companies’ rules to engage in prohibited behaviours?
Why are today’s young people nostalgic for older technologies?
How comfortable do young people feel using their ‘real’ name on social media?
How do teenage girls feel about digital photo editing?
How do young Chinese feminists talk about gender-based issues on social media?

I have published my research in various high-quality (Q1) peer reviewed academic journals, received invitations to contribute chapters to edited book collections, and have recently published my own monograph: The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (2025, UC Press). Within this work, I thoroughly enjoy applying core Sociological theories (for example, around identity, privacy, secrecy, social comparison, and stigma) to contemporary topics, and historicising recent tech-related trends.

Publications

Books

Gerrard Y (2025) The kids are online: Confronting the myths and realities of young digital life.

Journal articles

Feldman Z, Miltner K, Glatt Z, Bishop S & Gerrard Y (2025) Algorithms for her? 2: feminist approaches to digital infrastructures, cultures and economies. Journal of Gender Studies, 34(8), 1107-1117. View this article in WRRO
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 (2022) “Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: a nostalgic (re)imagining of Myspace. Internet Histories, 6(1-2), 48-67.
Gerrard Y (2021) What’s in a (pseudo)name?: Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research. Qualitative Research, 21(5), 686-702.
Gerrard Y (2021) Groupies, fangirls and shippers: the endurance of a gender stereotype. American Behavioral Scientist.
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
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 (2020) The COVID-19 mental health content moderation conundrum. Social Media + Society, 6(3).
Gerrard Y (2020) Social media content moderation : six opportunities for feminist intervention. Feminist Media Studies, 20(5), 748-751.
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) Book review : Behind the Screen : Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Media & Society, 22(3), 579-582.
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, 20(5), 605-622.
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.
Gerrard Y (2017) "It's a secret thing": Digital disembedding through online teen drama fandom. First Monday, 22(8).
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

Book 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 (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.

Digital 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

2022-2027	Economic and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) INCLUsive Digital Economy Network+	£3.25 million	Co-I
2021-2022	Screen Industries Growth Network (SIGN): ‘Creator labour: screen production cultures and transmedia intersectionality in Yorkshire’.	£62,872.32	Co-I
2021	University of Sheffield Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Account	£2627	To fund a secondment to the 5Rights Foundation
2019-2022	British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant: ‘Secrets on social media: exploring young people’s perspectives of anonymous secret-telling apps’.	£6,998.00	PI

Teaching activities

My teaching philosophy broadly follows the ‘social shaping’ approach, which means I seek to understand the complex relationship between humans and the technologies they use, particularly social media, rather than framing one as having more power over the other. To help me achieve this, I like to incorporate aspects of students’ own lives, experiences, and identities into my teaching practices, particularly how they use and understand social media platforms. One of the modules I designed in 2017 (and which is still taught in the School), Digital Identities, is currently informing the contents of a textbook called Digital Identities: An Introduction, to be published with Dr. Harry Dyer by Polity Press.

I supervise students at BA, MA, and PhD level and currently teach undergraduate students on our BA (Hons) Digital Media and Society and BA (Hons) Sociology degrees.

I am also actively involved in quality assurance for undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes through my External Examination roles. I have been the External Examiner for King’s College London’s BA (Hons) Digital Media and Culture since November 2021, and have recently taken up a role as an External Examiner for the University of Oxford’s MSc Social Science of the Internet.

PhD supervision

I am currently supervising three excellent PhD candidates:

Alex Kirby-Reynolds
Hongzhou (Joe) Zhang
Reuben David

I have also examined several PhD theses at national and international Universities, and have supervised the following students to successful completion:

Amel Bakour: Investigating young women’s attitudes towards female Algerian influencers
Beth Nutbrown: Toxicity, trolling and social bonding: how the League of Legends community functions and persists amid toxicity
Ziwei (Zoe) Xu: Negotiating feminism across Chinese social media