In this photo, Duguay has mid-length brown hair and brown eyes. She is wearing glasses, a black collared shirt, and a grey blazer.
Photo credit: Explore Concordia
Dr. Stefanie Duguay
- Associate Professor, Communication Studies
- Concordia University Research Chair
Are you the profile owner?
Sign in to editResearch areas: Digital media, gender and sexuality, networked publics, digital research methods, social media, digital platforms and governance, science and technology studies, app studies, identity
Contact information
Biography
Bio
Stefanie Duguay earned her PhD in Media and Communication from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, where she was an active member of the Digital Media Research Centre. During this time, she spent a summer as a PhD Intern with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. She graduated with distinction from the MSc program at the Oxford Internet Institute and she has professional experience working with the Canadian government in the areas of client services and digital strategy.Her research focuses on the influence of digital media technologies in everyday life, with particular attention to sexual and gender identity and social media. This has included studies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people’s social media use, dating apps, self-presentation, and everyday activism with the use of mixed traditional and digital research methods. Her research and teaching demonstrate a commitment to fostering inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and producing research that reveals power relations in sociotechnical systems.
She is a Concordia University Research Chair (New Scholar) and Director of the Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality (DIGS) Lab. The DIGS Lab aims to understand - through empirical research, theory, and creative innovation - how digital media, digital technologies, and digital culture are shaping intimate life, relationships, gender expression, and sexuality.
Communities
Member of:Feminist Media Studio
LabCMO
Association of Internet Researchers
International Communication Association
Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Teaching activities
Courses taught regularly
Undergraduate Courses
COMS 354 Youth and Media
COMS 472/521 Communication Technologies and Gender
COMS 411/541 Sexuality and Public Discourse
Graduate Courses
COMS 660/893 Definitions and Futures of Media Technology / Special Topics in Digital Culture and Digital Research Methods
COMS 605 Media Research Methods
Graduate Supervision
Read more about graduate student research on the DIGS Lab website or the Graduate Student Profiles page.
Supervision inquiries: I am open to receiving inquiries from prospective students whose work relates to the topics, methods, and perspectives that I work with. When contacting me through my Concordia email, please articulate this connection between your project and my research focus so that we can determine if it might be feasible for me to supervise your thesis.
Selected Publications
Book
Duguay, S. (2022). Personal but not Private: Queer women, Sexuality, and Identity Modulation on Digital Platforms. Oxford University Press.Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Duguay, S., Trépanier, A.M., & Chartrand, A. (2022). The hottest new queer club: Investigating Club Quarantine's off-label queer use of Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Information, Communication & Society. First published July 23, 2022.
Duguay, S., Dietzel, C., & Myles, D. (2022). The year of the "virtual date": Reimagining dating app affordances during the COVID-19 pandemic. New Media & Society. First published January 30, 2022.
Krishnan, P. & Duguay, S. (2020). From "Interested" to showing up: Investigating digital media's role in Montreal-based LGBTQ social organizing. Canadian Journal of Communication, 45(4), 525-544.
Duguay, S. (2020). You can't use this app for that: Exploring off-label use through an investigation of Tinder. The Information Society, 36(1), 30-42.
Duguay, S. (2019). "Running the numbers": Modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women's self-representation on Instagram and Vine. Social Media Society, 5(4), 1-11.
Ferris, L. & Duguay, S. (2019). Tinder's lesbian digital imaginary: Investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on a popular dating app. New Media & Society, 22(3), 498-506.
Duguay, S. (2018). Queer women's experience of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Published online before print: June 19, 2018.
Duguay, S. (2017). Social media’s breaking news: The logic of automation in Facebook Trending Topics and Twitter Moments. Media International Australia. Published online before print: November 4, 2017. doi: 10.1177/1329878X17737407
Duguay, S. (2017). Dressing up Tinderella: Interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app Tinder. Information, Communication & Society, 20(3), 351-367. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168471
Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S.(2016). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society. Published online before print: November 11, 2016, doi:10.1177/1461444816675438
Duguay, S. (2016). LGBTQ visibility through selfies: Comparing platform mediators across Ruby Rose’s Instagram and Vine presence. Social Media & Society, 2(2), 1-12. doi:10.1177/2056305116641975 [Open access]
Duguay, S. (2016). “Legit can’t wait for #Toronto #WorldPride!”: Investigating the Twitter public of a large-scale LGBTQ festival. International Journal of Communication, 10, 274-298. doi:1932–8036/20160005 [Open access]
Duguay, S. (2016). ‘He has a way gayer Facebook than I do’: Investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site. New Media & Society, 18(6), 891-907. (First published online in 2014) doi:10.1177/1461444814549930
Book Chapters
Myles, D., Duguay, S., Dietzel, C. (2021). #Datingwhiledistancing: Dating apps as digital health technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. In D. Lupton & K. Willis (Eds.), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives, pp. 79-89. Routledge.
Duguay, S. (2020). More than you bargained for: Care, community, and sexual expression through queer women's dating apps during the COVID-19 pandemic. In L. Melamed & P.D. Keidl (Eds.), Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory, pp. 305-314. Meson Press.
Duguay, S. (2019). "There's no one new around you": Queer women's experiences of scarcity in geospatial partner-seeking on Tinder. In C.J. Nash & A. Gorman-Murray (Eds.), The Geographies of Digital Sexuality, pp. 93-114. Palgrave Macmillan.