Shannon Brown

Shannon Brown, Ph.D.

shannon.brown@utoronto.ca

Research Interests

• Technology-facilitated sexual violence and gender-based violence
• Online child sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse material
• Human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children and youth
• Non-consensual sexting and sextortion
• Immersive and emerging technologies (social VR, smart devices) and digital harm
• Feminist science and technology studies; qualitative and phenomenological methods
• Trauma-informed, survivor-centred practice and research

Biography

Shannon Brown is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the intersection of feminist theory, science and technology studies, and social work. Her research asks how emerging technologies shape the ways people experience embodiment, relationships, community, and harm, and how gendered power operates within digital environments.

Her dissertation is a feminist hermeneutic phenomenological study of women’s experiences in social virtual reality. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it traces how women build community, encounter embodied harm, and practise resistance in immersive virtual spaces. The study introduces a Feminist Social Construction of Technology (F-SCOT) framework, which brings critical feminist theory into conversation with the social construction of technology to show how gender and power shape technological design and use. Her doctoral work was supported by three Ontario Graduate Scholarships and the RBC Fellowship in Applied Social Work Research.

Shannon has contributed to more than ten funded studies on non-consensual sexting, online child sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Social Work and Child Protection and Practice. She is Program Coordinator of the Post-Graduate Certificate in Victimology and full-time faculty at Humber Polytechnic, where she teaches and supervises undergraduate research. Her scholarship is informed by nearly two decades of frontline practice with children and youth.

Dissertation

“‘The Bros Are All Into Games and Stuff Like That, But Women Are Really About That Sense of Community’: A Feminist Phenomenological Study of Women’s Experiences in Social Virtual Reality”

Education

• PhD, Social Work, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto
• MA, Child and Youth Care, Toronto Metropolitan University
• BA, Criminology, University of Toronto