Dr. Andrea Braithwaite’s research analyses how popular discourses of gender, sexuality and sociability become political—that is, how popular texts and the talk they inspire vivify North American public debate about gender and sexual equality. Her work pays special attention to the strategies popular and everyday texts identify for challenging the political cultures of neoliberalism, and how feminist and proto-feminist ideas circulate in popular forms often deemed apolitical or anti-feminist. Identifying and critiquing gendered discourses of self-management and social justice, she tracks the traces and material practices of these affective discourses to representational and experiential spaces in pop culture and digital media. Her current work tracks representations of the 'chick detective' across media forms, focusing particularly on video games and on Canadian genre films. Games and Culture New Media & Society Feminist Media Studies Screening Justice: Canadian Crime Films, Culture and Society Teen Television: Essays in Programming and Fandom Video Games, Culture, and Justice Her work has appeared in journals including  ,  , and  . She also has chapters published in   and  , and in the forthcoming collection  . She has recently been awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant with colleagues across Canada to investigate Canadian crime films. Her courses in Communication and Digital Media Studies draw on these research interests. An award-winning educator, her teaching is cross-textual and interdisciplinary, and examines how media and political discourses circulate, change and are changed in our everyday encounters with them. Her courses—from Game Studies and Pop Culture to Television and Canadian Media—help students pinpoint the spaces that emerge within popular and digital cultures for critical reflection and intervention. Prioritizing social justice and equality, Dr. Braithwaite encourages students to contribute their original insights to critical conversations about social change. Her research and teaching foreground the principle of praxis that guides Communication and Digital Media Studies: knowledge as the basis for action and change.