Rebecca’s research crosses sociology, media and cultural studies and feminist theory, and she has particular interests in the everyday life of media; temporality (futures and presents); bodies, affect and new materialisms; and inventive methodologies. She is the author of three monographs and co-editor of four journal special issues, one journal special section and one book. She is Professor in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). She has previously worked in the Sociology Departments at Goldsmiths, University of London and Lancaster University.

Her current research explores everyday temporal experiences. This includes a project, Mediating Presents, on the digital mediation of time. Drawing on empirical research, it examines the significance of a present or ‘now’ temporality to experiences of digitally mediated culture. It was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2018-19) and has been published as a number of articles and a co-edited special issue of Media Theory. She is currently working on a monograph, which puts into dialogue classic and more recent work on affect to develop an argument about ‘infrastructures of feeling’, digital mediation and the temporal present.

As part of a collaborative project, A Day at a Time, and supported by a British Academy Small Grant (2021), Rebecca co-commissioned a special directive with Mass Observation and conducted ‘feel tanks’ with young people on experiences of time during the Covid-19 pandemic. An artist response to the research was launched in December 2021, and journal articles are in process.

Other publications include her recent monograph, Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing (2020, Goldsmiths Press), which follows glitter as it moves across different worlds (collaging workshops with girls, glitter bombing activism, films and its adornments of the outside and inside of the body). It proposes that glitter generates a plethora of politics, all of which indicate the makings of different worlds, although often not in ways that are straightforward or successful.

Her previous sole-authored books are Transforming Images: Screens, Affect, Futures (2012, Routledge) and The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience (2009, Manchester University Press). She co-edited Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013, Edinburgh University Press) and special issues of MAI, ‘Feminist New Materialist Practice’ (2019) and Sociological Review on ‘Futures in Question: Theories, Methods, Practices’ (2017). This latter special issue emerged from the interdisciplinary ESRC Seminar Series on Austerity Futures: Imagining and Materialising the Future in an ‘Age of Austerity’ (2012-2014), which she led.