Heba Sigurdardottir is a doctoral student at the University of Tampere at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her research is oriented toward global and transnational sociology with a focus on social movements' discursive strategies across different media platforms. For her doctoral dissertation, she has selected the #MeToo movement and related activism as a case study, partly due to its global reach and local impact. In her research, she has analyzed newspaper coverage of the #MeToo movement in different national contexts, and podcast and YouTube activism against gender-based violence in Iceland.

Dr. Gina Marie Longo is a feminist digital sociologist who studies how everyday people construct their understandings of citizenship, family, and nation in digital spaces. She received her doctorate from the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is currently an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Longo is a co-founder of the Digital Sociology Lab, which provides skill-based training to students and faculty through workshops and hands-on research experience. She has been featured in Sage Publication’s Gender & Society Podcast, ABCNews.com, MEL Magazine, and the London School of Economics US Centre blog. Her work has received awards for outstanding scholarship from ASA’s International Migration Section, the Eastern Sociological Association, and the University of Wisconsin’s interdisciplinary Research Center on Gender and Women.

Who is your favorite superhero and why? We answer this question before exploring the impact of fandoms on social activism, gender, and how society can be reimagined to better support people with invisible disabilities. Dr. Cook discusses how her new book acts as a how-to guide to doing chaotic good within any fandom.

Tanya Cook is a sociology professor at the Community College of Aurora near Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2019, Cook was one of 26 community college faculty awarded a research grant from Mellon/ACLS to support sociological research on fandom. Her current project, Always Keep Nerd Fighting: Fandoms as Social Movements, investigates how and why fans are becoming more charitable and politically engaged. Cook’s forthcoming book, co-authored with Kaela Joseph, on how to engage in fan activism, is scheduled for publication in early 2023. Her research and writing interests include social movements, sociological theory, and popular culture. She was recently awarded the Barbara R. Walters Award from the Easter Sociological Society for her paper “‘It’s a Gift and A Curse:’ How Covid Reframed Our Understanding of Disability as Intersectional Identity.” When she’s not trying to find new ways to use popular culture and fandom to democratize the classroom, you can probably find her at Comic Con.