About

Dr. Helana Darwin is an author, MeToo activist, and research consultant. Her past research included subject areas including craft beer culture, religious culture, the Body Positive Movement, and the gender binary system. She has utilized a range of digital methods including virtual ethnography, blog discourse analysis, and online comment sentiment analysis, in addition to traditional methods such as in-depth interviews and survey research.

Her most recent book is available for purchase here. Redoing Gender: How Nonbinary Gender Contributes toward Social Change illuminates the everyday labor that gender nonbinary people perform in order to achieve social recognition. In keeping with the famous “doing gender” sociological model, Dr. Darwin analyzes these process at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional levels, through in-depth interviews with 47 nonbinary people.

Dr. Darwin  also recently completed her second book, intended for a general reading audience, called #MeTooPhD: A Trauma Memoir. She is currently searching for a literary agent and a press for this book, which highlights the intricate layers of interpersonal and institutional abuse that push victims of professor-student sexual abuse out of the academy. A summary of the main points has been published at the PhD Voice blog, in an article entitled “The Hidden Curriculum: Insights from a #MeTooPhD Survivor.” Dr. Darwin is available for guest lecturing engagements about sexual abuse in the academy. Please direct all email inquiries to helana.darwin@gmail.com.

In the post-pandemic era, Dr. Darwin has pivoted away from academia into the far less toxic field of UX Research. She remains an active critic of the academy on Twitter and is open to ad hoc speaking engagements, upon request.