Professor Stefania Vicari

PhD (University of Reading)

  • Professor in Digital Media and Society
Publications

Stefania joined Loughborough in 2026. Prior to this, she held Professor and Senior Lecturer positions in Digital Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK (2016-2026), she was a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK (2011-2016) and a Lecturer in Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the University of Sassari, Italy (2009-2010).

Stefania’s background sits at the intersection of sociology, media and communication and cultural studies. She was awarded a BA in Communication Sciences (Summa cum laude) from the University of Torino (Italy), an MA in Globalization and Communications (Distinction) from the University of Leicester (UK) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Reading (UK), having spent her last doctoral year as a visiting scholar at Emory University (USA).

Stefania is Associate Editor of Information, Communication & Society (2023-) having acted as an editorial board member of Sociology between 2017-2024. She served on the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant Assessment Panel B (Sociology) (2022-2025) and is currently a member of the ESRC Assessor College.

She reviews for national and international fundings bodies, like the ESRC, Wellcome Trust, Irish Research Council, MIUR Ministry of Education, University and Research (Italy), Swiss National Science Foundation and Volkswagen Foundation.

Stefania’s research focuses on digital participatory cultures, lived experiences of health and illness and methodological innovation. She is currently leading NeGen-SOS (New Genetics, Same Old Surgeries?), an ESRC-funded project (2026-2029) focused on digital narratives, clinical practices and lived experiences of gynaecological cancer prevention. In 2022-2025 she led Previvorship, a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust exploring how hereditary cancer is represented on and experienced through mainstream social media. Prior to that, her work was funded by the ESRC (2018), Wellcome Trust (2013; 2016) and British Academy (2012).

Digital participatory cultures

Stefania has explored mundane social media practices of ‘talking politics’. Her original focus on informal politics in the transnational domain, (early 2000s Global Justice Movement, World Social Forum and Cuban blogosphere) has increasingly shifted towards health issue publics. She has researched social media practices on a range of platforms, contributing, for instance, to scholarship on the social media shaping of pandemic discourses (e.g., were Covid-19 memes political communication?).

Lived experiences of health and illness:

Between 2023-2026, Stefania was research lead and Executive Board member of Sheffield Cancer Research, co-directing its theme ‘Patient experience and voice’. Stefania is interested in everyday digital media practices of self-care, patient advocacy, lay understandings of health and illness and health activism. Her work has evidenced the importance of social media for rare disease patients and explored social media affordances and vernaculars for carriers of hereditary cancer syndromes (e.g., how do social media influence how we understand and experience hereditary cancer?).

Digital methods for cultural research:

Stefania uses a range of methodological techniques informed by network theory, textual analysis (frame analysis, critical discourse analysis) and visual methods. She is specifically interested in developing combinations of ‘quanti’ and ‘quali’ methodological steps in digital methods designs (e.g., how do we research local cultures through global platforms?).

Stefania has designed and convened a range of sociological and media communication modules across levels, programmes and institutions.

Examples of theory-based modules:

  • Perspectives on Digital Society
  • Digital Media and Social Change
  • Protest and Publics in the Network Society

Example of research methods modules:

  • Digital Methods
  • Media Research Methods
  • Researching Society

From 2020 to 2024, Stefania was the Director of the Data, Communication and New Technologies Pathway of the ESRC White Rose Social Sciences Doctoral Training Partnership.

Stefania has supervised the following PhD students to completion:

  • Yumeng Guo, "Constructing Digital Risk Communities: A Comparative Analysis of Official Communication about the Covid-19 Pandemic on Chinese and UK Digital Platforms" (2025);
  • Jingyi Ji, "Understanding Conversations about Health Issues on Chinese Social Media Platforms: A Study of the HPV Vaccine on Weibo" (2025).
  • Nuha Almohammadi, “Understandings and Experiences of Sports, Physical Activity and Related Digital Campaigning Among Saudi Young Women in Saudi Arabia” (2023);
  • Zheng Yang, “Citizen Science Communicators, Boundary-Work and Scientific Authority: Struggle for Discourse Authority between Scientists and the Public in the Digital Media Environment of China” 2021);
  • Semra Demirdis, “Hashtag activism? The role of Twitter hashtags during the 15th July ‘coup attempt’ in Turkey” (2021);
  • Jantiga Supapong, “More performing, less protesting: Exploring the mediated political engagement of Thai middle classes” (2017);

She is currently supervising:

  • Siyi Wang, “Inequality of migrant Chinese women's access to social support in the UK in the Internet context”;
  • Victoria Knowles, “English football, race and social justice in the digital age: exploring Twitter framing and discourse in the wake of ‘taking a knee’”;
  • Annalisa Johnson, “Social Media and the Lives and Narratives of Adoptees in the UK”.

Stefania has examined doctoral candidates in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Spain.

  • Vicari S, Ditchfield H & Chuang Y (2025) Contemporary visualities of ill health: On the social (media) construction of disease regimes. Sociology of Health and Illness, 47(1), https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13846.
  • Vicari S & Ditchfield H (2025) Platform visibility and the making of an issue: Vernaculars of hereditary cancer on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. New Media & Society, 27(6), https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241229048.
  • Ditchfield H & Vicari S (2025) Identity roles and sociality on TikTok: Performance in hereditary cancer content (#BRCA and #Lynchsyndrome). Social Media + Society, 11(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251340862.
  • Vicari S (2023) The making of digital health citizenship. Polis, 37(1), 133-146, http://doi.org/10.1424/106956.
  • Vicari S (2023) Frame semantic grammars: where frame analysis meets linguistics to study collective action frames. Discourse Studies, 25(2), 309-318, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456231154737.
  • Vicari S & Kirby D (2022) Digital platforms as socio-cultural artifacts: developing digital methods for cultural research. Information, Communication & Society, 26(9), 1733-1755, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2027498.
  • Murru MF & Vicari S (2021) Memetising the pandemic: memes, covid-19 mundanity and political cultures. Information Communication & Society, 24(16), 2422-2441, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1974518.
  • Vicari S (2021) Digital Media and Participatory Cultures of Health and Illness. Routledge.