Alison Winch

Staff details

Alison Winch

Position

Lecturer in Promotional Media

Department

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Email

a.winch (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

  • Digital Culture Unit
  • Researchers at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies who have a special interest and expertise in digital culture in the broade

Alison looks at connections between intimacy and power in digital cultures.

Alison is a critic and poet. In her academic work she analyses intimacy and power in a branded media culture, using Cultural Studies and feminist theory. Her books include the co-authored The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power (Routledge 2021).
Alison has also published on generation, brand sociality, celebrity, wedding media, and surveillance networks, among others. Her monograph Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Palgrave, 2013) looks at how the affect of friendship is harnessed across popular culture.
Alison's current research project analyses the household as a primary site of data extraction for platforms and their advertising technologies. Her third monograph is on Promotional Media (Polity 2025). She is writing her second full poetry collection.
Working across theory and practice, Alison co-convenes BA Promotional Media with Ruth Garland.

Teaching and supervision

Convenor MC51005B Culture and Cultural Studies
Convenor MC52069A The Promotional Industries: Convergence and the Digital
Co-Convenor MC52069A Creative Collaborations

Research interests

Alison's second monograph is The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power (Routledge 2021) which is co-authored with Ben Little. This book offers a critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence and ideology, their group dynamics and the role they play in the wider socio-cultural and political formations of digital capitalism.

Alison's current single-authored research project analyses the household as a primary site of data extraction for platforms and their advertising technologies. She investigates the speculative subjectivities forged in the contemporary postdigital asset economy.

Her third monograph is on Promotional Media (Polity 2025).

She is writing her second full poetry collection.

Publications and research outputs

Article

Winch, Alison and Schaller, Karen. 2024. Generating Intimacy: Rage, Female Friendship and the Heteropatriarchal Household in TV post #MeToo. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, ISSN 0097-9740

Winch, Alison and Little, Ben. 2021. Mediating American hospitality: Mark Zuckerberg’s challenge to Donald Trump? European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(6), pp. 1243-1260. ISSN 1367-5494

Little, Ben and Winch, Alison. 2020. Patriarchy in the Digital Conjuncture: An Analysis of Google's James Damore. New Formations(102), pp. 44-63. ISSN 0950-2378

Audio

Little, Ben and Winch, Alison. 2023. The Tech Bro Billionaires are Playing Us All.

Book

Little, Ben and Winch, Alison. 2021. The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9780367260118

Winch, Alison. 2019. Darling, It's Me. London: Penned in the Margins. ISBN 9781908058676

Winch, Alison. 2016. Trouble. Birmingham: The Emma Press. ISBN 9781910139394

Book Section

Little, Ben and Winch, Alison. 2024. ‘‘A new social contract for our generation’: A Conjunctural Cultural Studies Approach to the Millennial. In: Helen Kingstone and Jennie Bristow, eds. Studying Generations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 85-104. ISBN 9781529223491

Winch, Alison. 2020. ‘Bishop Berkeley is my Boyfriend’ [poem]. In: , ed. The Forward Book of Poetry 2020: The Best Poems from the Forward Prizes. London: Bookmark, p. 133. ISBN 9780571353880

Winch, Alison and Hakim, Jamie. 2016. 'I'm selling the dream really aren't I?' Sharing Fit Male Bodies on Social Networking Sites. In: Sandro Carnicelli; David McGillivray and Gayle McPherson, eds. Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 39-52. ISBN 9781138955073

Conference or Workshop Item

Winch, Alison. 2023. 'Invited ‘Consenting to the Promotional Household in the Current Conjuncture’'. In: Conjuncture Workshop. Technische Universität Dresden, Germany 27-29 October 2023.

Winch, Alison. 2023. 'Founders, Rivalries and US West Coast Tech'. In: Digital Platforms and the Future of Political Solidarity. LSE, United Kingdom 28 March 2023.

Winch, Alison. 2023. 'Consenting to the Promotional Household'. In: Algorithms For Her? 2. University of Sheffield, United Kingdom 23 - 24 March 2023.

Digital

Winch, Alison and Little, Ben. 2023. Digital Capitalism in the Age of the New Patriarchs.

Winch, Alison. 2018. Thomas Hobbes Works Motherhood.

Edited Book

Normand, Lawrence and Winch, Alison, eds. 2013. Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781441184764

Edited Journal

Winch, Alison; Forkert, Kirsten and Davison, Sally, eds. 2019. Neoliberalism, Feminism, Transnationalism, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, (71). 1362-6620

Attwood, Feona; Hakim, Jamie and Winch, Alison, eds. 2017. Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies, Technology, Journal of Gender Studies, 26(3). 0958-9236

Winch, Alison; Littler, Jo and Keller, Jessalynn, eds. 2016. An Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies: Conflicts and Connectivities, Feminist Media Studies, 16(4). 1468-0777

Film/Video

Winch, Alison. 2021. This Conjuncture: Patriarchy in the digital conjuncture.

Winch, Alison and Little, Ben. 2021. Book launch for The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism.

Other

Winch, Alison. 2023. Musk isn’t serious about fighting, Zuckerberg says. The Washington Post, Washington.

Winch, Alison. 2023. Strike Badge. leftcultures.com.

Little, Ben and Winch, Alison. 2022. Billionaires gone wild: Musk, Zuckerberg slash jobs, roll dice with future of Bay Area tech icons. The Mercury News, San Jose, California.