Dr Isabelle Higgins
- Teaching Associate in Media, Culture and Sociological Theory
Contact
About
Dr Isabelle Higgins is a Teaching Associate in Sociology (Media, Culture and Sociological Theory). Isabelle is interested in conducting multi-methodological qualitative research in empirical contexts where emerging forms of technology are made sense of and used by people in their everyday lives. She engages with a range of social theory to critically interrogate the historically situated forms of social inequality that are visible in such empirical locations.
Isabelle’s PhD research, for example, explored how social actors use web-based technologies to encourage the adoption of children into families in the USA. This included examining the online practices of governmental agencies who administer websites profiling children in state foster care, as well the social media practices of adoption intermediaries and adoptive parents working as social media influencers. Isabelle used a range of methods including digital ethnography and critical technocultural discourse analysis to engage with these online practices. She also conducted archival research and policy analysis at the Library of Congress to contextualise her digital findings. Theoretically, Isabelle drew on decolonial theory, sociological theories of race, racism and intersectionality, insights from cultural studies, cultural sociology and digital sociological traditions to engage with this data.
Since completing her PhD in 2024, Isabelle has written with collaborators about the sociological significance of generative AI, the datafication of users engaging with pornographic content online and the commodification of children’s bodies in a global context. She continues to work on preparing her PhD findings for publication, with some early findings published with the journal New Media and Society.
Isabelle studied for her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge. She was awarded a double first-class honours for her undergraduate degree, with a distinction (starred first) in her Part I examinations, where she received the highest mark amongst a cohort of 181 HSPS students. As an MPhil student in the Sociology of Marginality in Exclusion, Isabelle received the Polity Prize for best dissertation, and she passed her viva for her PhD with no corrections. Isabelle has held fellowships at Cambridge Digital Humanities, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge; the John W Kluge Center, Library of Congress; The New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry and the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley.
Isabelle loves to teach and designs and delivers lectures, seminars and smaller group teaching to all three years of undergraduate students, as well as to MPhil and PhD candidates. She is particularly interested in supervising research projects and designing teaching that combines analysis of understudied digital practices with social theory produced from the 1960s onwards.
Research
Research interests
- Media and Cultural Sociology
- Social Theory
- Sociology of Race and Racism
- Digital sociology
- Reflexive Sociology
Research Projects
Isabelle’s PhD research explored how a range of social actors use web-based technologies to encourage the adoption of children into families in the USA. This included conducting a critical analysis of the websites funded and/or administered by US federal and state government agencies which classify children on the basis of a range of identity characteristics and in many cases make personal information publicly available. She also conducted digital ethnographic fieldwork on YouTube and Instagram to engage with the practices carried out by private adoption agencies, adoption intermediaries and adoptive parents working as social media influencers, and a critical technocultural discourse analysis of all of the above material.
While at the Library of Congress, Isabelle conducted archival and policy research to contextualise these online practices. This involved paying particular attention to practices carried out at the turn of the twentieth century that photographed and monetised children of colour in the USA. Theoretically, Isabelle drew in this project on the work of racial justice and reproductive justice scholars working in multiple sub-disciplines, as well as a range of work from the sociology of race and racism, decolonial thought, cultural studies and digital sociology. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse, and the complexity of ‘intersectionality’ as Collins (2019) defines it were also central theoretically to Isabelle’s analysis. Since finishing her PhD in 2024, Isabelle has been developing this writing for publication.
One of the questions Isabelle’s work engaged with was the public display of children’s images and personal information online in the public domain. She took up a Tech Policy Fellowship from 2024 - 2025 at the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy to explore how these questions were further complicated by the capacities of prompt-based generative AI technologies and the related process of web-scraping. She is also working collaboratively to explore how digital commodification of children’s bodies online is a global question, far surpassing the US adoption industry.
Isabelle’s interest in generative AI was developed during the year she spent as Teaching Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence where she contributed to teaching for the MSt in AI Ethics and Society. She has written with colleagues in the Sociology Department about generative AI and disciplinary sociology, and co-convened the department’s AI Forum throughout the 2025 - 2026 academic year.
Isabelle also held a postdoctoral research position in 'Digital Wellness and Disinformation' for the ESRC funded Digital Good Network in 2023 -2024. She worked on research that aimed to complicate commonly held understandings of the digital ‘rabbit holes’ that connect digital wellness, conspiracy theories and far-right ideologies.
Isabelle’s interest in how ideologies travel and change across different transatlantic cultural contexts, particularly in relation to everyday web-based technology use, is something she continues to explore. Over the summer of 2026, she is working with a team of three student researchers to conduct online research into AI generated content related to this question. In the 2024-2025 academic year she had presentations accepted to both the British Sociological Association and the International Sociological Associations annual meetings on different aspects of this theme. Her presentation at BSA, for example, was titled ‘The recursivity of anti-racist social theory: Studying race and culture in a racialised cultural context’ explored how the theories she was using in her PhD research (critical race theory, poststructuralism, intersectionality) emerged in the work of actors to the right of the political spectrum whom she encountered online during her research.
Research Groups and Affiliations
- Co-convenor Seeing Sociology: Sociology, Visual Art and Film Research Cluster
- Research Affiliate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy
- Associate, Cambridge Digital Humanities
- Culture and Politics Reading Group
- Sociology of AI
Publications
Book Chapters
- Higgins, I. (2025) “Bodies of Children in the Archive: Realities of Recognition and Resistance” in Decolonizing Bodies, Eds. C Ureña & S Varma; Bloomsbury Academic Press
Journal Articles
- Higgins, I., & Meikle, G. (2026). The celebration of exploitation: A case study in platform promotion of users’ data. New Media & Society, 0(0)
- Baert, P., Dorschel, R., Hall, M., Higgins, I., McPherson, E., & Philip, S. (2026). Dialogues Towards Sociologies of Generative AI. Social Science Computer Review, 44(1), 59-79.
- Higgins, I. (2024). Classified children: A critical analysis of the digital interfaces and representations that mediate adoption in the United States. New Media & Society, 26(11), 6597-6614.
Other
Media Articles
Teaching and supervision
Isabelle's teaching is driven by her passion for inspiring critical thinking and ongoing, in-depth engagement with relevant texts and arguments. She cares about encouraging students to think rigoroursly about how the theories, methods and empirical sites they study can be learnt from and have impact on everyday life. Isabelle delivers original lecture material for all three years of the undergraduate HSPS degree and MPhil students. For the 2026 - 2027 academic year, her teaching practice will include:
- Delivering the Soc1 (Introduction to Sociology) topic on ‘Race, Ethnicity and Racism’
- Delivering a self-designed topic (lecture and supervisions) titled ‘Race Critical Code Studies: Blackness, Digital Technology and Everyday life for the Soc2 (Social Theory) course
- Designing and delivering a topic (four hours of lectures and supervision) for Soc6 (Advanced Social Theory) titled ‘New relationalities, old inequalities?’
- Delivering three self-designed Soc7 topics (lectures and supervisions)for Soc7 (The Sociology of Media and Culture) titled ‘British Cultural Studies’, ‘Intersectionality and the Internet’ and ‘Digital Users: Interfaces, Affordances, Algorithms’
- Designing and delivering two MPhil lectures on ‘Racial identities and popular cultures’ and ‘The cultural politics of generative AI’
Isabelle will also be supervising students taking Soc4 (Concepts and Arguments), students undertaking undergraduate dissertations, supervising MPhil students in the department, acting as a faculty advisor for a small number of PhD students and continuing as Director of Studies and Soc1 supervisor for undergraduates at Clare College. She will act as paper organiser for Soc7: Media, Culture and Society and continue to co-convene the Advanced PhD Seminar Series which she established during the previous academic year with two PhD students from the department.
Historically, Isabelle has designed and delivered a series of lectures and workshops on ‘Decoloniality in Research Methods’ for Cambridge Research Methods. For the 2023 – 2024 academic year, Isabelle held a teaching fellowship with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Her work there involved supervising assessed essays and dissertations for students undertaking the MSt in ‘AI Ethics and Society’, and delivering seminars and discussion groups for Module 3: Theories and Methods for AI Ethics and Society. She continues to contribute to LCFI teaching at various points in the academic year.
Isabelle is committed to extending her teaching practice beyond formal academic settings: most recently, for example, presenting at OCR’s Sociology Subject Forum for A Level Sociology, co-running a ‘Practice-Lab’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘Late’ event, open to the public and facilitating a ‘speculative futures of academic freedom’ writing workshop at the Academic Freedoms Workshop, an event by the Studies in Academic Freedoms Research Network in collaboration with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Isabelle’s pedagogical approach was recognised by the University of Cambridge’s Student Led Teaching Awards, where she was nominated and shortlisted for the award in Inclusive Practice in 2022. In 2024, she received a Student-Staff Partnership Award, from the Staff and Educational Development Association, for her collaborative work with students. Isabelle very much values the opportunity to connect and learn from the students she works with, and encourages any students interested in her work to be in touch.
Awards
- Tech Policy Fellowship, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, 2024–2025.
- Student-Staff Partnership Award, Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), 2024. National professional award presented in recognition of leadership on a funded university research initiative directing a team of four student co-researchers.
- AHRC International Placement Scheme Fellowship, Arts and Humanities Research Council & The John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), 2022. Competitively selected for a 6-month international research placement.
- Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) Fellowship, New School for Social Research (New York), 2022. Fellowship awarded for intensive seminar residency in critical social theory on the theme of 'The Politics of Sentiment'.
- Shortlisted Nominee: ‘Inclusive Teaching and Learning’, Student-Led Teaching Awards (SLTA), University of Cambridge, 2022. Shortlisted for a university-wide award, from over 400 student nominations.
- Methods Fellowship, Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH), University of Cambridge, 2021–2022. Fellowship to design and deliver digital humanities methodological training for postgraduate researchers and faculty on the topic of 'critical, intersectional and decolonial digital methods'.
- Polity Prize, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, 2020.Distinction: Awarded for the top-ranked MPhil Dissertation within the Department of Sociology cohort.
- ESRC 1+3 Doctoral Training Partnership Studentship, Economic and Social Research Council & Pembroke College, 2019–2023. National postgraduate funding award won via highly competitive selection (fees, living and research allowance).
- Honorary Cambridge Trust Scholar, University of Cambridge, 2019–2020. Merit-based honorary designation awarded by the Cambridge Trust for MPhil studies.
- Myson College Exhibition for Personal Achievement, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, 2019. Competitive college-level distinction awarded annually to only one student for outstanding personal and academic merit over the entirety of their degree.
- Marie Lawrence Prize for First-Class Honours, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, 2017 & 2019. Awarded for achieving clean First-Class marks in both Part I and Part IIB university examinations.
- Winifred Georgina Holgate Pollard Memorial Prize, University of Cambridge, 2017. Awarded for ranking first overall out of an entire examination cohort of 181 students.
- Fulbright SUSI Fellowship (Study of the U.S. Institutes for Student Leaders), Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State / US-UK Fulbright Commission, 2017. Selected as the sole candidate from the United Kingdom (and one of only 22 across Europe) for a 5-week intensive academic programme on the topic of Civic Engagement at the University of South Carolina with a policy forum in Washington, D.C. (travel and stipend provided).