I am an Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Leeds. Before this I was a Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sheffield, and a Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.
My research looks at influencer work as an emerging part of the cultural industries in the UK and beyond. I study how content creation labour and representation are shaped by social media platform architectures and cultures. I also look at ‘influencer creep’ – how influencer culture is increasingly shaping more traditional forms of cultural work.
My work has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, The Sociological Review, Social Media + Society, Communication, Culture and Critique and Feminist Media Studies. You can read these pieces here. I am writing my first book, titled Influencer Creep, which has been contracted by University of California Press.
I frequently work with policymakers to help them understand influencer work and take influencer culture seriously. I was the Specialist Advisor to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Influencer Culture (2022) and I have contributed to EU Policy on the impact of influencers on advertising and consumer protection. I helped co-develop the European Commission’s Influencer Legal Hub, which is an accessible resource launched in 2023, designed to helps influencers understand their responsibilities under consumer law.
I founded the conference Algorithms for Her?, which I have run alongside a great team in 2019 (at King’s College) and 2023 (at University of Sheffield). I am an Associate Researcher on the European Research Council funded HumanAds project, in addition to PI on the British Academy funded project ‘Advertorial Regulation and Influencer Cultures’ and PI on the Meta funded Seed Grant ‘Feminist Entrepreneurship and Advertising Cultures’.
Please get in touch at s.h.bishop@leeds.ac.uk
Sophie Bishop 