Alison Hearn, Ph.D.

Alison Hearn is a Professor of Media Studies in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on the intersections of digital media, promotional culture, self-presentation, the credit economy, and emerging forms of work.

Alison Hearn is a Professor of Media Studies in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the University of Western Ontario. She is a cultural critic, media theorist and academic labour activist who studies the convergence between identity, sociality, technology, culture, and capitalism, drawing from several different theoretical traditions, including cultural studies, critical theory, autonomist Marxism, and feminist theory. She focuses on what Jason Read has called “the micro-politics of capital”: the non-economic and prosaic ways the prevailing logics of capitalism show up in our lives, summon us to become certain kinds of selves, and feed on our affective responses in the process. She also writes about the university as a cultural and political site. She has published widely on these issues in such journals as Social Media+Society, Cultural Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, and the International Journal of Communication, and in edited volumes including The Media and Social Theory, Blowing Up the Brand, and Commodity Activism. She is co-author of Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research and co-editor of Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle (Queens-McGill Press, 2022). She has also served as the Chair of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).