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Department of Sociology

Akane Kanai

Assistant Professor

Email:- akane.kanai@warwick.ac.uk

Room:- D0.10 Sociology department, Social Sciences Faculty

Pronouns: she/her

Link image to hear Akane Kanai name

Profile

I am a feminist cultural studies scholar. I research the relational politics of identity, and how this is shaped by the emotional life and spatio-temporalities of online culture and popular culture. In particular, I am interested in how claims to knowledge, authority and legitimacy are made and negotiated in everyday spaces. My work is principally informed by feminist and critical race theory, and discursive and empirical approaches from cultural studies, sociology and media studies.

Prior to joining Warwick in 2025, I worked at Monash University in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia where I was involved in convening the Gender and Media Lab and Digital Intimacies Research Group. In 2021 I was awarded the Monash Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research as an Early Career Scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Research projects

I began my academic career by investigating the politics of femininity and relatability on Tumblr. Since then, my most significant body of work has sought to understand the everyday life of feminism in online culture. This has comprised projects mapping how feminist concepts travel in online culture, and researching the experience of online intra-feminist conflict. Currently, I am completing a large 4 year project on how feminism is understood and mobilised by young Australian feminists in their everyday lives. The monograph from this last project is forthcoming with Duke University Press in Spring 2026 and you can listen to the project podcast, Feminist Not Fearless, on Spotify and Apple.

I am also a co-investigator on a project on young people’s selfie-editing practices, led by Associate Professor Julia Coffey (University of Newcastle, Australia), with Dr Amy Dobson (Curtin University, Australia) and Professor Rosalind Gill (Goldsmiths). This project seeks to understand shifts in the experience of embodiment in response to increasingly normalised affordances to brighten, smooth and ‘touch up’ one’s face IRL and online. We are currently writing a monograph that is forthcoming with Bristol University Press in 2026.

Selected publications

Books

  • Kanai, A. (2018) Gender and relatability in digital culture: Managing affect, intimacy and value. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
  • Burke, P.J., Coffey, J., Gill, R. and Kanai, A (Eds). (2022). Gender in an Era of Post-Truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Selected open access articles

  • Kanai, A. (2024). What’s perfect, and what’s good? Feminist Media Studies, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2024.2394515

  • Kanai, A., & Coffey, J. (2024). Dissonance and defensiveness: orienting affects in online feminist cultures. Cultural Studies, 38(4), 645–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2023.2183971
  • Kanai, A., & Zeng, N. (2023) Influence and expertise: distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures, Journal of Youth Studies, https://10.1080/13676261.2023.2199149
  • Sobande, F., Kanai, A., & Zeng, N. (2022). The hypervisibility and discourses of ‘wokeness’ in digital culture. Media, Culture & Society, 44(8), 1576-1587. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221117490
  • Kanai, A., & Gill, R. (2020). Woke? Affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture. New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, (102), 10-27. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:102.01.2020
  • Kanai, A. (2019). Between the perfect and the problematic: everyday femininities, popular feminism, and the negotiation of intersectionality. Cultural Studies, 34(1), 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1559869

PhD students

I am an involved and active PhD supervisor and have supervised a number of PhD projects to completion:

  • Zoe Condliffe (2023) Solidarity, rage and justice: Transformation and consciousness-raising for contemporary feminist activism
  • Natasha Zeng (2024) Asianness in motion: online cultures and everyday spatio-temporality
  • Jae Roh (2024) Isolation and struggling to belong: Older Korean migrants’ managing emotion through homeland digital media
  • Natasha Dimitrovska (2024) ‘Woman is not wolf to woman’: Solidarity, struggles and contradictions in digital feminist activism in the Balkans
  • Shirley Chen (2025) Queer reality TV and the boundaries of belonging: Tracing the affects of progressive citizenship through Queer Eye and RuPaul’s Drag Race audiences